ARLINGTON, TEXAS — Running a few minutes behind, I heard the robins on my way to the car. Four cormorants flew over the parking lot. There were the White-winged Doves along Arkansas, and the gulls over supermarket corner as usual.

By noon, I was ready to spend the last 30 minutes of the year in the park across the street. But the car was dead — lights left on in my haste. Blast.

I sat to eat on the large rocks beside our building and watched a Great Egret in the pond. Yellow-rumps flew back and forth, calling insistently. Rock Pigeons soared overhead sometimes.

My back was to the sun, which warmed me unless the wind puffed. So this is the end of the solar year, the solar year I set out to chronicle as I huddled by my parents’ house in Missouri, waiting for the very first bird.

I had been excited to observe the year not according to our quirky calendar, but according to our little planet’s movement round the sun. This is how I said it then:

At the winter solstice, the sun hovers briefly over the Tropic of Capricorn, leaving the Northern Hemisphere cold and dark. Summertime birds have fled to the tropics; northern birds have abandoned their homes, flying hundreds of miles in search of food. College students (also driven by hunger) have gone home for Christmas. And then, slowly, the sun begins to clumb, up past the equator and on to the Tropic of Cancer, pushing the birds north as it goes, to sing and mate and raise their families. As days grow hotter, the birds cease to sing, the hemisphere begs for relief, and eventually, the sun retreats, back to the underbelly of the world. That is the story of the New Year. That is the story I wanted to tell.

I quickly abandoned the list I’d set out to keep. I hadn’t yet conceived of a blog, and I stopped writing for a season too. Newspapers to put out, you know, and one last academic push.

Then my notions went topsy-turvy when I flew to that “underbelly of the world.” Suddenly it was winter again — though you certainly couldn’t tell by the weather. My narrow perspective was broken open wider.

There were four scaup in the pond, a female in the lead and three males close together behind her. A diminutive grebe rested on the water. Then it was time to go back to work.

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