Bang a Gong, It's the Year of the Ox!

Right after slugging our way back up to Rural after Noo's Melanoma Center appointment, my first order of business was readying us for the Chinese New year.  Today everyone enters the Year of the Ox (or the Cow, if you're more vanilla in your zodiac descriptions), so all the babies born from now until next February are going to be little oxen.  This is the usual reason I get excited about the New Year:  the babies I deliver are suddenly transformed from dogs into rats, or whatever.  This appeals to my sense of the absurd.

This year, however, I am taking the New Year much more seriously in light of Noo's diagnosis.  The New Year is a chance to introduce new and positive energy into our life, so I have been removing harmful feng shui elements from our house and generally cleaning like a banshee, because the new year is a clean slate.  I have also taken up the study of feng shui, which makes my mother laugh because I have turned my nose up at the practice because it fell under the general category of if-my-mom-takes-it-seriously-it-must-be-crap adolescent rejection which characterized my early adulthood.

I'm a bit shamefaced to realize that I allowed myself to fall into the category of people who turn their backs on their heritage, only to embrace it later in life, when illness and other challenges send them searching for meaning.  I would love to have been one of those people who investigated their culture and traditions throughout their lives, but it is better to get a late start than no start at all.  So I have taken to reading about feng shui and Chinese decorative arts, and announced rather self-importantly to my family that I am finally ready to resume the study of the language my mother tried--unsuccessfully--to drill into my teenaged brain.  You can imagine what those lessons were like.  Oy.

Stay tuned for more Tales of a Chinese Monkey (my zodiac sign, btw).

Comments

[mommy michael]

I have a little dog and rat! Happy Chinese New Year indeed.

My husband's family is burmese/chinese. I look forward to those little red envelopes. =)

[rlbates]

Happy New Year! (I was born in the year of the rooster.)