Almost 20 years later, I landed another job at another community paper. This one was in Yellow Springs, Ohio — perhaps you’ve heard of it — and the paper was well over 100 years old, with Quaker roots.

Years ago I had a friend, culturally but not religiously Jewish, who devised a third greeting: “Happy Hanukwanzamas!” I was there the day he worked it out on a piece of paper, fitting the three words together.

In any life, there are things that require healing. Often this healing happens in secret, the way winter turns into spring (and sometimes back again).

There’s no problem the wind and rain can’t solve, even the November wind and rain. The wind and rain can’t name the problem, can’t diagnose it, can’t prescribe, yet they can, shall we say, dissolve it.

Like a lifetime achievement award, Yellow Springs bestows the moniker of home ownership at the end of a person’s career, not at its beginning or mid-point. And why not? A person doesn’t own a thing just because a piece of paper says she does.

Sometimes when a story touches on the very spots I most wish to avoid, something else occurs. Rather than fuzzing my reception, the story’s nearness to my own experience seems to open a channel for really hearing.

It’s still February, a strange and diffident month. It’s a little scared of its own boldness, so ducks its head, like the snowdrops, and calls down the snow.

Matching my gait to my thoughts (or was it the other way around?), I realized that one part of freedom was what I was experiencing right then: the removal of arbitrary constraints.

A winter garden holds as much spring as spring itself, the way the pause before speech holds as much speech as the flow of words that follows.

Are fresh starts really possible? Three weeks after the annual big one — the new door of Jan. 1 — the question seems urgent. This is the time of year when I teeter between hope and despair.