The dog's favorite night

It is the best, it is the worst, it is the last, it is the first night of the year.

It's each dog's favorite adventure.

For shortly past ten each New Year's Eve, we load the red sled with cheese and cold apple wine, a few brittle bits of white birch, tuck a harmonica in my parka and begin the half-mile climb to … the waterfall.

It is New Year's Eve again … that final, perfect, bright white night of the old year.

You come too. Light the lantern.

Christmas is over.

For some of us, Christmas has been over for a long time. Christmas is too often guilt and greed and gluttony. Christmas is family stress and the Yule drool of over-stuffed, bad-tempered consumer children. Visa and MasterCard are the holiday's happiest celebrants.

But New Year's is another matter entirely.

New Year's Eve is a clean, cold, secular holiday which still happily resists drunks and the animators of TV cartoon specials. It's a fine time with none of the electric rat-rag icicles Canadian Tire crazies have hung on houses from here to Halifax and back again.

New Year's isn't rotten brats kept awake until midnight, nor know-nothing relatives hunkered down before the tube for an afternoon of imported football.

It isn't bumping bodies in Nathan Philips Square or blowing car horns up and down Yonge Street. It isn't dropping mortgage payments to throw confetti at bored headwaiters atop the city's higher hotels.

It isn't sitting home feeling sorry for yourself. Or a tear-y, beer-y pub crawl where strangers get sick on your shoes.

Put on your mittens. Follow me. We leave all that behind… the yahoos, the yelling, the shabby old year.

Climbing the high hill, the snow scrunches underfoot like cornstarch. Our breath floats away in icy fogs, like 2019. Don't be sad. It's just the way thing ought to be.

The dog pads along in happy wonder, putting his paws carefully in our footprints.

We leave the road now, to climb the ravine, half-hypnotized by stars overhead and the gurgle of the frozen brook wrapped in ice.

It's very quiet. And cold. Not lonely, but alone.

We are alone in this world. We come that way, we go alone as well. And New Year's Eve is a perfect time to rejoice in your own magical renewal, trapped in your unique travel between beginning and end in the baffling universe.

Catch a snowflake on your tongue.

Do you know the odds of eating that single ice crystal in all the world? The stars shine and we are here at the waterfall--for the what? A tenth, twentieth, thirtieth time?

The dog picks snow clumps from his paws. I light the fire while you make a snow angel. By flickering light, the frozen falls shimmer. High in the tops of distant trees, a stange call floats by on the night breeze. Wolf? Polar owl?

We sit on the buffalo sled robe, the sharp slice of cold apple wine in our throats, looking deep, deep into the fire.

Who knows where Justin or Drake are tonight? Who cares?

We sit in the snowdrift like the wolves, to sing in our souls and bay at the sky. We will be in love and out of love, or somewhere in between, thoughts suspended in flicker and hiss of the fire.

My harmonica notes float away in snow squalls, circling in spirals up til they vanish over the trees.

The fire crackles and over the hill the icebound lake crackles back.

The snowdrifts shifts … a hiss … a whisper … a lover turning in bed … the sound of rabbit whiskers when a nose crinkles … snow crystals tumble into drifts … drifts building, moving into one another … the drifts, the years, the sifting, shifting snow.

A crisp, northern New Year's Eve in a Zen forest, where trees crack in the cold, but no human can hear them.

We're here! We see it!

You remember a half-forgotten song. The dog digs a hole. The apple wine cuts our breath like an icicle.

And sometime between the lighting of the birch logs and the last ember,  it is 2020. And it begins to snow.

Hey, friend. I really like ya.

Thanks for being here. Thanks for being. Thanks.

The bottle is empty.

Our toes go cold and noses drip.

There is nothing left to connect us to the old year. So without a whimper or a bang, we put out the fire … and let it slip away.

The waterfall vibrates, ice spiders weave invisible webs in the dark and we walk, arm in arm, back to the road. The dog soils a snowdrift in celebration.

Hey! Got on the sled! With a plush you are off, hurtling downhill into the blackness. The dog disappears after you.

The sounds of sled and shout fall away, far below me. The sky shines, alive with stars. And four lines come as always from the depths of memory…

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide.
Above the earth is stretched the sky,
No higher than the heart is high ….

Yes.
Happy New Year.
See ya.