One of our favorite activities was the yearly New Year’s Eve party that the girls had at my house. We would fudge a bit and hold the party with 10 o’clock assigned the role of midnight because the girls were young and were best home with their families at midnight. But the rest of the trappings were there, decorations and bubbly in stemmed glasses. Their bubbly was sparkling white grape juice but it was enough to make their eyes shine, and to make them giggle as we raised our glasses to the New Year.

Every year we would use games and traditions from other cultures to fill the evening, and I still like to include one in my New Year’s observance. Some people somewhere, I don’t remember where, write down things from the past year that grieve them. They record transgressions they wish they had never committed, disappointments that made them falter, and words to represent experiences they wish they hadn’t had. The slips of paper these sorrows are written on are things that keep them from being able to fully live in the present. Then they take the slips of paper and burn them and the pain and fear from them disappear into the last night of the old year and, released, are not taken with them into the New Year.

It seems too easy to work; you write it, you burn it, you’re free from it.

But there is relief as those slips incinerate, and the ashes left are so insubstantial that they have no power to stay as you scatter them with a breath into the dark night. I never have a lot of things to send out, but this year there will be a few.

And then I’ll be ready for a fresh New Year’s start.

Happy New Year to each of you and yours.

Then release a swarm of children dressed properly for the medium onto the field, and stand back and have your faith in the future restored. They will disperse over the entire surface, to the furthest corners possible, and set themselves to work. Holes will be dug, walls erected, and tunnels engineered. Tirelessly, and totally absorbed in their work, children who have to be beckoned back to classwork repeatedly when they are indoors are impossible to deter from achieving their goals outside. A few territorial squabbles may snarl progress for a few minutes, but they are worked out without adult mediation and teamwork prevails.

Ring a bell, the signal that tells them their worktime is over and they can go into a warm shelter; they will work on.

Call them. Tell them that it’s break time; they will work on.

Blow a whistle and call, louder; they will work on.

When they are finally called in and sent off the field to the comparative comfort and ease of their classrooms, consider that your future will be fueled by the children you’ve watched.  There is hope after all.

The weather here is seasonal, which means that as happens a few times every winter, the children were kept out of the bitter cold for recess today. As I've written before, while the other midday people work mostly inside, I am outside with the children, but since the kids were inside, I was too, with time to talk to the other people who do this very odd job.

The occasional indoor day is a nice break for me, and for the most part, I like the people I work with, although on most days we only have enough time for a quick hello. I’m hoping that the extreme cold ends by Monday though. Today’s indoor climate was enough to hold me for quite a while.

Everyone was complaining, mostly about other coworkers. I learned that some are too soft, some are too hard, and no one is just right except for the person relating the grievance; at least that seemed to be the theme of the fairy tales that I heard today. The too-soft people don't enforce the simple rules we have, the too-hard ones have no heart and jump on every little transgression, and just to make it even more interesting, the story teller usually had hurt feelings over something that was said or done to them by a colleague and that made the tales more dramatic.

After I was done for the day and sat in my car, waiting for it to warm up a bit before going home, I thought about work today. I have no doubt that I am an irritant to some coworker or other. It would be foolish to think that I’m not, because everyone at work today was angry at someone else. I certainly must outrage someone, possibly for being both too strict and too lenient, but no one has mentioned anything and I probably wouldn't worry about it anyway. As long as I do a good job and the kids and I enjoy each other's company at least most of the time, I think things are fine.

What I don’t understand is why the other’s don’t let go of their grievances. The casual remarks that started most of the resentment expressed today were held onto and tended carefully until they grew to change the landscape of the job. It was an unhappy group of adults who spent those hours together today. We have no authority over each other, but people handed power to make themselves angry and resentful over rather than accept that there are several ways to look at almost anything and different viewpoints are inevitable.

I’ll take that other kind of cold, that outside freeze, any day.