I’ve never been good at New year’s stuff. I hate all the looking back, the year in photographs or quotes or cartoons, the best-of-lists (except of course when one of my books is listed–can you say hypocrite?).

And it’s been several decades since I made resolutions, which have come to seem horribly self-conscious and even silly. When there’s something in my life I want or need to change, I already know it in my bones–there’s no need to commit the desire to paper.

Maybe I feel all this even more strongly than usual, since it has been such a shapeless, blighted, holey-old-sweater of a year, and since 2022 could easily be written ???? What can we predict? Next to nothing.

Except this—the world’s children will continue to grow and question, bloom and seek, cry and laugh, stumble yet scramble up again. And I will keep on writing for them, writing the best books I can summon up from all I’ve learned of life and all I hope will come. Some of my favorite lines in The Most Perfect Thing in the Universe come near the end, as Loah (oh how I love Loah!) drifts off to sleep listening to the northern mocking bird sing outsider her window. “Opening her eyes for a moment, she saw a single moonbeam, white as a snow goose feather, tumble over the lovely dark wall of trees. The world was big and the world was small and that was the mystery of it. The mystery and the wonder and …The mockingbird sang Loah off to sleep.”

Our new year is here– the reminiscing and resolving can giving way to the business of getting up, greeting the day, getting to the work. Wishing you a year full of mystery and wonder!