The Christmas cookies Gary left in the tin are like the kids not chosen for dodge ball, standing with large spaces between them on the shiney, echoey gym floor. Some of the cookies are monochromatic, boringly cakey, while others, shaped like an evergreen tree, are embalmed with green food dye.
I snap each cadaver in half, my hand moving in a downward, circular criteria, like the lazy emptying of a wash bowl, to the last one—iced on the bottom as if it had been dragged in joint compound.
Across the street the men are finally chipping two large branches that fell from an old tree that have lain across the neighbor's tiny front yard since fall. The noise is like a vacuum cleaner gone mad, or what I imagine is the sound an ocean liner makes as it pushes out to sea. It is what the word droning means.
I return to the tin, my coffee still warm.
If there is anything remotely the flavor of black walnuts, 2025 will be a good year. But there is only cinnamon and brown sugar and the taste of butter mixed with flour.
My mind, left to itself as Gary naps upstairs, returns to the places I walked in my forties. All the different running shoes I've owned show up in the old pictures. I recognize them like the faces of old dogs, standing obediently on the ground, serving me well.
All those hikes just to find the source of a brook or a forgotten root cellar in the woods. I saw copperheads sunning themselves on the top of a canal lock. I saw the old pillars of the capitol building stacked like junkyard cars. I found a full pack of cigarettes on a bench where someone left them—a New Year's resolution.
The last, ugliest cookie has delightful chips of pink marzipan on top shaped like rose buds and a not-too-sweet flavor of—yes—(at least) English walnuts. It is kinder to my teeth than the others, and the rosebud candy defies identification: citrusy, foreign, like a forgotten taste—a taste of older Christmases. The icing flakes off innocuously from the bottom like wrapping paper.
The dog, too, is asleep. All that sounds is the kitchen clock, ticking its first hours of the new year.
The snow is gone.
