One of the joys of living in a multi-cultural area is that I get to say “Happy New Year” at least five times a year.

From the day I entered nursery school New Year meant the start of school in September. In kid-think September is a NEW Year – new teacher, new homeroom, new desk, new rules, sometimes new classmates – maybe even a new building. I cannot think of anything more specifically “New Year” than the start of school.

December-to-January is the time to order seed catalogs if you’re a gardener or a farmer. That’s a New Year for the plants. I guess it just depends on your definition of NEW and YEAR.

This was the perfect day for an 8.2 mile hike – my first longer-than-5-mile hike in weeks. What a difference a day makes. Yesterday I was ice hiking in rain. Today I spent my hike negotiating mud, flood, and slippery rock surfaces. Even with today’s obstacles, I covered in 45 minutes what took me over an hour yesterday. Don’t tell me it’s not spring – mud season is when snow melts faster than the earth can absorb the moisture, just before the sap starts to rise.

I get the feeling that our calendar system is profoundly inaccurate.

This was first published in PAWS & TALES Magazine.

Nature poem

Nature poem

Title of both an award-winning animated JJ film and a JJ poem.

A more-than-a-food poem.

A workshop assignment using apparently unrelated words including: boundary, lamps, host, parasite, crutch, eunuch and balance.

Written in 1995, long before reality TV shows.