Twenty years.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of my first post on this blog.

On Dec. 22, 2005, I wrote:

A few years ago, while living in Southern Illinois, I ran across a little publication called The Waterman and Hill-Traveler’s Companion. Created by Jim Jung — owner of the late, great Hillside Nursery in Carbondale — the almanac contained all sorts of fascinating information, including a wonderful day-by-day account of all the interesting events occurring in the forests and fields of Southern Illinois.

Twenty years ago, while living in the Red Fork neighborhood of Tulsa, I found that I missed Jim’s almanac and went searching for a similar publication covering northeastern Oklahoma. No such publication existed, so I decided to set up a blog to record my own observations, calling it “my own personal little Red Fork almanac.”

I got up at 1:30 a.m. yesterday to watch the livestream of the winter solstice celebration at Newgrange, where an opening above the door of a 5,200-year-old passage tomb allows the rising sun to illuminate the interior of the structure on the morning of the solstice, marking the return of the light after the longest night of the year. As I sat down to write this entry nearly 24 hours later, it struck me that I am, perhaps, not so different from my Celtic ancestors.

From here, the days grow longer, and like the ancient Celts, I am celebrating the return of the light. When I sat down on the night of the solstice in 2005 to create a blog with the intent of documenting natural events as a means of warding off seasonal depression, I had never heard of Newgrange, knew nothing about Celtic mythology, and had only the vaguest sense of what the solstice represented, yet I do not believe the timing was a coincidence; rather, it was an impulse encoded in my DNA, passed down for thousands of years and hundreds of generations, manifesting itself in a 21st-century form to see me through the winter.

It’s 1:30 a.m. MST, and Tucumcari is dark and quiet. It’s a mild, clear night, and if I stand in the driveway and look up, I can see a star twinkling frantically in the sky above me — perhaps the same one I almost mistook for an airplane on this night in 2005.

As I wrote two decades ago: “It’s a grand night for sleeping. Rest well.”

Emily