Returns and Resets Before the Year’s Replenishment (Very Late December)
In the month of snow and elk shedding their horns, a small reprieve happens between holidays. A new year approaches, sure, as it has done winter after winter, year after year—not the most useful of predictions, that must be admitted. Better to have the outlandish, the immediately falsifiable, otherwise the Almanac loses its utility, for writer and reader alike. As Georg Christoph Lichtenberg said, “One can make a good living from soothsaying, but not from truth saying.”
The commercial districts have slipped into temporary torpor. Receipts have been stapled and bundled; the till replenished; salt broadcast, liberally, generously, on landings and sidewalks. Even at this late date, some caution is necessary; some illumination necessary. On lampposts, in shop windows, the generic seasonal symbols remain alight—electric stars and snowflakes, electric snowmen and snowwomen, various electric snowpersons—remain alight for a little while longer. And then the calendar turns over, a week and change after the solstice, days growing brighter and brighter, like nickels broken from a roll, come falling, come tumbling over the dingy carpet, come to rest where they may.
