Auld Lang What??

    Another year has closed, and another one stretches out in front of us like a blank page. This year began quietly; still overstimulated and drained from our whirlwind Christmas travels back to Alabama, we celebrated the holiday in our own tradition-sleeping in, doing little to nothing all day other than reading, watching movies, and playing guitar... This year a cold cleansing rain drummed on the roof all day, making futile even a half-hearted attempt to walk the dogs or otherwise get out of the house. I'm not sure, but I think I did change out of my pajamas that afternoon just in time to cook dinner-the Southern staples of blackeyed peas and turnip greens accompanying baked ham, macaroni and cheese, and cornbread.
    Of course, this year like any other there were countless news stories explaining New Year traditions, and the obligatory explanation of Auld Lang Syne. Mixed up in its nostalgic melancholy for old times past there is a secondary allusion of "old land's own". Of being in exile from one's own land and heritage. Of being a stranger in a strange land. The migration of Scottish people all over Europe and the New World referenced by the longing for old times long ago apply to any of us who may feel displaced or lost.
    Having living in Texas almost a year, I feel the melancholic homesickness for past and for homeland resonate within whenever I visit Alabama. I enjoy Texas,with its vast prairies under a sky that goes on for ever and ever, and the excitement and pulse and diversity of Houston with its millions of residents, and of its cowboy culture and earnest artiness and parks and walking trails everywhere. But my pulse quickens when I travel back to Birmingham, to Clanton, to Opelika, and see the familiar rolling forested hills of Alabama rather than the scrub prairie so common here. When I see Auburn tags on cars,or when I drive down narrow country Alabama roads that weave between valleys and forests...
    It just feels right to go home.
   Back home, the landscape looks lush and fertile and verdant in a way that nowhere else other than the Southeast looks. Unrealized to me, the rolling hills and plains of Alabama have become such a part of my environmental outlook that I search for them everywhere. Traveling eastward on I-10, I drive discontented over miles of Louisiana's swampy bayous and scanty scrub forest, only relieved when Mississippi's vistas, so similar to Alabama's, appear.
      It is a shock to realize how much I miss the state of my birth. Although the people in Texas are friendly, their drawling accents almost identical to those I grew up with, the wide-open sky offers endless possibilities each day, and the opportunities are boundless, this place does not fit me like a second skin like Alabama does.
     So this New Year I raise a "cup o' kindness" to my old home and my new one. To Texas, my adopted home, land of my future. But also to Alabama, which holds within its clayey red soil and its rushing streams all of my yesterdays. To everyone I know, I remember you in this season of new birth and blank slates:

      Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
      Should old acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?
      For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne
      We'll take a cup o' kindness yet, for auld lang syne.