I Burn The Old Year

This afternoon, we wielded axes. We pulled down dead tress.  We chopped up wood. We built a bonfire.  We struck matches.  We lit paper.  We waited for the fire to take.  We stood back from the flames.  We warmed our hands.  We watched sparks fly up.

I imagined the sparks as all the plentiful, beautiful life-giving moments of my year of 2014.  They shone bright as love through the smoke.

I thought of the smoke as the happenings of my 2014 which have fogged my happiness.
As dusk fell, the smoke faded to invisible, disappearing into the darkness of this year's last twilight as the sparks flew up higher: up and up, shining bright and brighter.