Autumn is officially over, leaves finally cleared, trees naked, winter sky a show of planets that begins early with Venus glazing the western sky. It’s time to dwell briefly at the door between the old year and new one, beginning with the month (January) named after the Roman god Janus. In mythology, Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking forward into the future, the other looking back into the past. Often shown holding a key, he is the protector of thresholds, gates, and openings.

I spend New Year’s Day flipping back through my calendar, portal to the past year, where my scrawlings reveal the content of my days. Dog to vet. Photo to publisher. Trash day. Unseen on the calendar are things that have mattered and were faithfully kept by rote and memory: Write poems. Walk in spring when new leaves are that lime green color for just a few days before deepening. Read Merton’s meditations on Sundays. Call my niece and tell her family stories. Genuflect before donkeys and rivers and hickory nuts, anything fearfully, wonderfully made. I like to think Janus guides such unspoken moments into the new year and guards their sanctity in the past.

Of course, New Year’s Eve is a different story. Though I appreciate that noise-makers and a midnight kiss ward off evil spirits, and that resolutions date back 4000 years to the Babylonian promises to Janus, I will celebrate with my own tradition. When Harry Met Sally will be playing at home. “Auld Lang Syne” will give its nod to Robert Burns’s old poem—by the light of the ancestors, if I don’t fall asleep before I can sing it.

Fall’s Labor, Fall’s Memory

Suppose this day’s rake and heave
is a room I’ll forget in ten years,
but for an image or two—Will it be
red-orange leaves cindering

the stoop, boots wet with dew
drying on the sidewalk, leaking
small shadows at their heels?
Light knits together twig

and inchworm, brushes my hand
as it sweats. I pry up rocks from clay,
and hope I’ll recall the heat
between arm and shovel, a goodness

of work sparking steel to flint.
This time of year, people
burn in barrels, smoke the air
with old things they’ve let go.

But we never really know
what we’ll long for later, whose face
might flutter down a scaffold
of color. There are questions

I’d ask my dad if he were still alive.
He’d pause with his rake and say,
well, let me think now……
Then would, as best he could, remember.

Sharon Perkins Ackerman is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine. Her poems appear in the Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Appalachian Places, Kestrel, Salvation South, Blue Mountain Review, and several others. Her second poetry collection, A Legacy of Birds (Kelsay Books), will be published early 2025 and available on Amazon.