Letter ToThe Future, 1/1/2010

It is the earliest of morning on this first day of January in Plainswell, Michigan.
I awoke before dawn & realized I couldn't sleep.

It is not that it would have been impossible to go back to sleep so much as that it seemed a fitting time to be awake, to watch this dawn on the first morning in January, the first day of a new decade that still sounds like life in the distant space age future.

I think the whole world thought we would be further along by now. There was definitely something about space travel and flying cars planned for now. There have been many technological advancements this last decade,we apparently now have cell phones that can project a picture show on the wall. But I am less interested in those just now than the great expanse of the frozen lake just outside the double paned glass doors right before me.
The world is not so different today that it was yesterday, despite yesterday being claim to the rise of a new decade, a full moon, a blue moon and, at least in Australia a partial lunar eclipse.

No,today feels like any other morning, any other day except at this hour it is quiet and my mind is for once quiet, and I could hear myself think so clearly it seemed a good time to write.

It occurs to me someday my children might read this.

Someday they might ask me what it feels like to be alive in this time.

What will I tell them?

I will tell them it was good to start off New here in the pure white of Michigan on this first morning of 2010.

Because the "00's",the "oughts", were an UNdecade. Everyone was so exited and anxious about what would happen when the ball fell in time square in 2000, people were afraid of the dreaded Y2k bug which was supposed to shut down computers and computer systems world wide and banks too and it turned out to be a non entity just like the rest of the decade. Not that nothing important happened. At least one thing really important happened right here in the US of A.

Yes folks, right here in the good old US of a black man was elected president for the first time in a country so racist and classist it seemed remarkable that there was even a black professional GOLFER in the decade before. This is especially remarkable considering the fact that black folks were free sovereign souls deserving of freedom was considered remarkable some 14 decades before that.

These things aren't considered so remarkable now.


What is remarkable to me at least is that we are are still HERE together. That no one has gone for the red button and nuked ourselves and our neighbors into oblivion yet, that I am laying peaceably by my new husband right now, that there are sounds of a baby upstairs that isn't mine but is much like the one that someday will be. That I am now 30 and a grad student destined to be a crazy Art Teacher and hopefully next year I will also be mastering in Painting, an art I so dearly love...

Back to the present, there are scented geraniums in from the cold weathering the winter on the warm side of the glass. I too hope to weather the winter on the warm side, and though its lovely here am looking forward to going back to sunny Albuquerque. I am exited to see the puppies and the chickens, the brunchies and our lovely house, the cactus under just a dusting of snow, and lovely brash and blushing Sandia mountains at sunset.

I love where I live. I love my life. I am looking forward to living it in a new and healthier way. To make it a year to remember. A remarkable one.
Even if there isn't any flying cars.