Tulips in December

Flowers in the House, on New Year's Eve (visit Jane for an international tour)

I have never made fuss about a New Year. I inherited from my mother a feeling of vague apprehension, open antipathy and and quiet suspicion about it. A reaction against knee jerk festivities and hollow celebration.

But I am looking forward to 2013. Does that mean it is going to blow up in my face? I am circumspect about optimism. Now is safer than tomorrow. Take care of today and tomorrow will look after itself.

And about the tulips...at the local flower sellers (who rarely sell local flowers...) tulips have been a fixture for three weeks, now. I try to buy seasonal flowers. As a gardener, a grower of plants, a cook who loves vegetables and leaves that belong to now, it just feels better to be buying asters, rather than freesias, in October. Daffodils in April. Dahlias in high summer. And so on. But I have succumbed to the tulips, Sylvia Plath notwithstanding.

I don't know where these tulips come from. Nowhere in the world in late December is a tulip growing of its own volition. But the weather is cold, the bunches stay fresh in their buckets, in front of the ubiquitous, heavily pesticided roses, the blue chrysanthemums, the florists' gum...

And the New Year is around the corner. It is a rare moment when I can look back and say with satisfaction, OK, this is what I did, and that was good. And this is what lies ahead. And I can do that, too.

And things are possible.

(...if you need a snack to go with your bubbly, there are some crunchy roast pecans next door, at 66 Square Feet (the Food)...also Harry Belafonte. But that's another story.)