The Day That Belongs to No One

Last night's glasses were still on the kitchen counter at half past ten in the morning. Two of them, mine and my sister's, each holding a thumb of flat champagne, and mine carrying a crescent of lipstick I did not remember leaving. The bottle stood between them, foil stripped, and the shortbread plate had drifted into a fine powder of crumbs. The cheese board sat under a tea towel.

That was the whole party — the two of us, a fire that burned down to ash still holding the shape of the last logs, and the television counting down to nothing. My sister had driven home in the dark afterward, and by morning the house was mine. I stood looking at the wreck of it and felt the strangeness of the day. The first of January is the one morning of the year with nothing on it — no school, no work, no obligation with a time attached.

I put on my boots. The leather had gone stiff from a December of cold, and the laces kept the shape of last winter's tying. Sitting on the bottom step, I could hear the house — the radiators ticking as the heat came up. I had not been outside since the day before yesterday, and I could feel it, the kind of cabin fever that makes the body remember it is a body. When I opened the back door, the cold hit my face like a hand.

The road out front had frozen in the night. A little thaw on New Year's Eve had softened the gravel, and the cold came behind it and set the tire tracks hard. The ruts ran like iron ridges the length of the road, and walking down the crown of them was like walking on a washboard. The sun was up but useless — too low to warm anything, throwing long blue shadows across the frozen puddles. My breath hung in front of me and stayed, as if the air were too cold to carry it away.

Nothing moved. The houses sat back from the road with their curtains drawn, and the only sound was the dry creak of boots on powder snow that had frozen again. Smoke rose straight from one chimney and stood still in the air. No cars came.

Then a man came out of his garage two houses down, carrying a shovel, and set to scraping his driveway. The sound of the metal blade on the gravel carried. He did not look up, and I did not call out.

I walked to the bend and stopped there. Last year's stalks stood through the snow along the fence line, grey and broken, heads bent by the weight of the season. The puddle in the low place had frozen white, and I tested it with the toe of a boot; it held, and then it did not, the ice giving way with a crack that sounded loud in the emptiness. The day had no program, and neither did I.

The decision I had meant to make — the tree, the dishes, the sorting of the year to come — was waiting at home. I made it standing on the crown of the road, and the decision was to make no decision. The day belonged to no one, and I would not be the one to claim it. I turned and walked back the way I had come, boots finding their own prints in the hard snow, the house growing ahead of me.

Back inside, the kitchen was exactly as I had left it. The tea towel still covered the cheese board; the glasses stood where they had stood. I poured the flat champagne down the sink — the lipstick crescent going with it — and washed the glasses, dried them, and put them away. It was the only work I did that day. I did not take the tree down. It stayed up into the first week of January, and I was glad of it.

By two o'clock the sun was already losing height, and I sat with a book and a blanket, the way a person sits when nothing is expected of them. The man with the shovel finished and went inside; his door closed. The road was still, the shadows longer.

I remember the frozen ridge of the gravel under my boots, the white sun with no heat in it, the sound of a shovel carrying through still air. I have had busier Januaries since, and I will have busier ones again. But that one was a day that belonged to no one, and I gave it back to itself.