By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: December 31, 2007
At midnight tonight, the horses on this farm will age a year. That is
the custom — every horse has the same birthday, Jan. 1. Like all
things calendrical, this is a human convention. When it comes to
equine conventions, I know enough to notice some of the simpler forms
of precedence: who goes first through a gate, who gets to the grain
feeder ahead of the others. But I can report that the horses make no
fuss about their common birthday or the coming of the new year.
Tonight, like any other, they will be standing, dozing on their feet,
ears tipping back and forth at the slightest of sounds.
There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their
pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve.
What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my
presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.
It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of
midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of
species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing
of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I
remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself
thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions
have no meaning.
It’s not that time isn’t passing or that the night doesn’t show it.
The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame
the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual
rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow.
No two nights are ever the same.
I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just
for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly
within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an
idea of what that’s like.
I know because when I stand among the horses tonight, I will feel a
change once midnight has come. Some need will have vanished, and I
will walk back to the house — lights burning, smoke coming from the
wood stove — as if something had been accomplished, some episode closed.