Snapshots | New Year's Eve in Mendocino, California

It has worked out that every two years or so, Charlie and I spend New Year’s Eve celebrating with our dear friends Elizabeth & Einar. E&E live in Stockholm, Einar’s home city, but their country’s generous (or, better yet, very humane) vacation time affords them long trips home to California, where Elizabeth is from and where they met.

Two years ago we stayed in Monte Rio, at the very edge of the Russian River right before it hits the Pacific. Three years before that, we celebrated on a rocky hilltop in Stockholm as hundreds of their neighbors lit fireworks inches away from each other (Swedes are very responsible and very trusting revelers, it seems).

This year, we rented this great cabin in Little River, just south of the sweet and historical town of Mendocino, California. We cooked and ate and walked the dog, tried to finish a Sunday crossword, played a weird and addictive bean farming game and drank a lot of coffee. We dreamed up an 8 course meal (seafood pasta, potato latkes, soup shots, hot shots and more), and the three of them prepped it while I popped over the hills to Hopland to photograph my very last wedding of the year.

I arrived back to our cabin at 8pm, we toasted to our lives and our dog and each other, and spent the next eight hours alternating between eating, drinking, cooking, plating, answering New Years prompts, shouting over each other, listening closely to each other, and very, very clearly annoying our very sleepy dog.

It was the best.

And I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but as Charlie, North and I walked off our hangovers through a thick fog at the edge of the coast, ten stories high above the raging sea, I felt a shift. A new beginning. A phase change. A new set of thoughts bursting through to join my old and comfortable and uncomfortable ones.

And it really feels like a wonderful new year.