55 Revolutions

01.22.2025

I have a habit of keeping the Christmas ornaments up well past January 1st. Some years until Valentine’s Day. Their bright colors and fine cut angles, as highlighted by even the weakest winter light is a welcome contrast to the wilting and exhausted poinsettias disintegrating into fine flakes on the floor.

Eventually, convention takes over, even for me, and I have to admit it’s finally time to take down the ornaments, swaddle them in tissue paper and store them in a closet for the next nine months.

But this year, I’ll be keeping one of those ornaments on display well through winter, and perhaps indefinitely. This ornament—a replica of the globe, flying a simple but aspirational flag declaring “PEACE ON EARTH”—this ornament, I’m not taking it down. I have no intention of hushing its message and hiding it in a closet. This year, more than any, seems like the year to keep that flag flying high, no matter how sentimental, how naive it may seem.

Also: it’s just adorable, even though I’m pretty sure the continents don’t look like that from space.

Small Sphere; Big Dream. - 01.21.2025

As of today, I have spun around the sun 55 times. The good old earth, many more times than that. Tiny passenger that I am, I can only scratch the surface, peak into the smallest of windows. But what a marvel that is…to be given the chance to do even that.

And what a surprise to learn that, after all those years of dreading January, you find a way to not only come to terms with it, but to begin to see what it’s been offering all along. For instance, the Golden-crowned Kinglet, whose high-pitched calls are one of the best reasons to take a walk in the woods on a cold day. Due to the high frequency and swoop of the Kinglet’s song, which drops an octave at the finale of its melody, it is one of the first bird songs that the human ear ceases to hear after a certain age.

If you had told my seventeen-year-old self that one day, her single birthday wish would be to spin one more time so she could hear the Kinglets again the next January, she would have rolled her unwrinkled eyes at you and walked out of the room. Forgive her. She doesn’t know any better. But she will.

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January’s Turn

I wax on about the Kinglets.
One day you'll ask me
to stop talking about them. 

Until then, again I call out 
the bright of their high song
through thick, unlit trees;
their golden Nike-striped crowns
fluttering fast and loose,
undoing my annual dread.

Just one more time, 
let me sing their praises
while residing inside
this earthbound dusk of a month. 

Just once more, a turn,
an indulgence I am 
at last prepared to ask for.

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circa 1987