To Your Health!

The change of the years always brings new things. Resolutions, the post-holiday season, and new digits that have to be hardwired into the brain before writing checks.

For us, this new year brought new snow, a new tradition, and friendships both new and renewed. To celebrate this rather arbitrary holiday, Julie, Abbey and I joined ten other friends at a cabin in the Waterloo-Pinckney State Recreation Area. We typically gather with this group earlier in December, but the cabin was booked; so we moved our plans to the New Year's holiday and started what appear will be a new tradition.


As we do most years, we enjoyed a long hike on Monday. The hike Julie, Abbey and I did was a little bit shorter than the others', as little legs needed a shorter loop.

The temps were in the mid thirties and the birds were singing. In fact, some chickadees were even prematurely singing their spring song.

Monday night about an hour or two before midnight, the snow began to fall. This was no ordinary snow, but a real dumping, complete with thunder and lightening. When dawn broke and I ventured out doors in just my Sorels and my bedclothes to take a pee, I found 15 inches of fresh white snow had blanketed the world over night.

Indeed, the new snow was an excuse for the gang to help Abbey make a seven-foot-tall snowman, complete with cookies for eyes and raisins for his teeth.

The whole weekend was relaxing and enjoyed in the company of a dozen, easy-going, nature loving folks. Our friend Andy did an excellent job of reserving the cabin and making sure this event went smoothly. Even while he was visiting his family in Poland earlier this year, he was thinking of his hiking friends in Michigan. That was evident in the kindness he shared by bringing each of us a little 100ml bottle of one of Poland's finest treats for sipping by the campfire on a snowy, late December night.

Na zdrowie!