The poplar trees are dancing with the blue jays and cardinals out my window. The sky, in shades of blue and grey and peach, paints the windmills a winter white by contrast. Snow swirls across the ice on the bay; last week’s excellent skating ruined by the rain. Downstairs little boys are playing Ligretto with Grammy, the sounds of shouting and hands slapping the table furiously filter up the stairs. Hannah is curled like a cat on the fish-print beanbag behind the yellow wing backed chair in the living room. It’s her reading cave. So far this week she’s devoured three of the Harry Potter books and successfully given herself nightmares enough that she climbed into bed with her little brother two nights ago, “I need to sleep with you, but can you look that way so I don’t smell your dragon breath?” They appeared bleary eyed at breakfast. Tony is working, with one eye on his new helicopter box, it won’t be long before he heads for the basement to spend half an hour flying. Gramps is circulating through the house, clucking like the proud Papa rooster he is, plotting the bunk house he wants to build for the boys in the clearing down by the marsh. It is the last day of the year.

One year ago we were feeling quite lonely on our sandy strip of bay on the Mediterranean, having just mailed the grandparents back to Canada. Not surprisingly, Al Jazeera doesn’t carry coverage of the ball drop in Times Square, so we watched the festivities in Athens and had a lot of fun calling “into last year” at midnight our time, dinner time on the east coast of the USA & Canada. This New Year’s Eve will pass with less trilling and fewer gunshots fired into the air. We’ll spend the last day of the decade with friends the children made sailing last summer; I’ve known the Dad since I was five. His brother punched me in the belly when we were in Kindergarten, I’m almost over it. This evening will pass like so many others, wrapped in a blanket of logs, warmed by the wood stove, the new dragon sitting in his cave on the stove puffing steam out his nostrils, presiding over the festivities. I’m hoping for a clear night, studded with stars so that at exactly midnight I can slip out onto the deck and wish upon the Blue Moon that won’t return for another two decades.

I’ve been thinking about what to wish for. I don’t want to miss the chance, after all, it comes only once in a Blue Moon. I’m finding it hard to come up with one real wish that encapsulates everything: the experiences of the past year, the new leaf we all wish for when the clock strikes midnight and the myriad of hopes and dreams and silent wishes for the future. My heart is miles deep and ever a whirlwind, which makes it hard to reach in, sift the contents and distill them into the essence of who I am and what I really, truly wish for the coming year. Maybe I’m the only one, I don’t know. I’ve got twelve and a half hours until I have to close my eyes and wish as hard as I can, all the way to the moon and back. Unless I can think of something better, I intend to wish with all my heart for a year filled with Love and Peace and Renewal and ask the God of the Universe to bless my heart and my feeble attempts at making that wish come true. What are you going to wish for?