Tradition

We had stopped for coffee in little plastic cups, at a family-owned store on the way up.

It's important, you said. And I understood.

We drank them in the car, ceremoniously, before starting back out for the valley. It's just coffee but it's something else too.

I can't feel my toes anymore, but I keep walking, over the ridged wooden walkway that spans the wetlands. It's cold, colder than I imagined, even bundled into your jacket and hat.

Walk, I tell my feet.

I don't know how much farther the walkway continues, and I'm afraid to ask. It curves away into the slope of the mountain, into the stark sharp colours of the land and the forlorn tangle of rushes.

Over the far mountain ridge the clouds are tumbling, boiling coldly.

I point. Look, I say.

We watch as a hole opens up in the great heaving mass of cloud, and a blaze of light comes pouring through. We keeping walking and watching, in silence, for some minutes, pointly mutely whenever the sun reappears. No words, just pointing, at the sky, at the places the light illuminates. The sun is too low on New Year's Day to reach into the valley, but the far heights of the mountain slopes that ring us are burning with light.

And then, the lake.

I don't think I can keep going, but I do, right to the waters edge, putting one foot in front of the other, willing the cold away so I can stand where the water hisses across the pebbles and grin at you. I do it because it's important, just as stopping for the coffee was, because this is not just about today. Because these things have an otherness already, a well-thumbed smoothness of familiarity. Because these things are the markers of a path into all that's yet to come.

Because this is how traditions are begun.