2013: How Lucky Can It Be?

Comes 2013, pulling along hopes for a year better than the last. Cynics will say it couldn’t be any worse. Fact is, hardly anyone enters a new year believing it’ll be worse than the one before it; most of us see the new year coming and we . . . believe.

We believe January turns a page, literally and metaphorically. There’s something hopeful and freshening about beginning a new month and a new year with one flip of a calendar page.

For some of us of a certain age, the calendars themselves used to be culturally significant;  advertisements on old calendars amount to a walk back through time: Items from sparkplugs to drugstore medicine to soft drinks were depicted on calendars of varied sizes. Long before the profusion of computers, phones and electronic reading pads, a calendar on the wall was the only way to know in a glance what the date was.  In the poorest of homes, including mine, calendars added texture to mostly blank walls, showing scenes and people far more exotic than any in our lives.

It’s a new year, it’s a new month, it’s a new day. And, calendars can be created by anyone with enough talent to make the art with a camera or paint brushes and duplicate it using a computer.

Barbara W. East, my gardening friend in Gadsden, Alabama, is one of those talented people. She sent me the calendar that I photographed for this piece, showing an image of Lenten rose, one of the earliest-blooming perennials in the year.

Barbara, who likes giving the calendars to family and friends, describes conditions in which she made the photograph:  “The light was really beautiful that morning. Lots of dew, sun just coming over the hill across the road. Everything just sparkled.”

That’s a morning to love. A good one to think of while the year is fresh, young, new. When there's no reason to doubt that 2013 could be the luckiest year ever.