Happy New Year!

The Jewish Rosh Hashanah festivities are upon us. Filled with golden honey poured over slices of shiny red-skinned apples, noodly kugel and doughy challah, and celebrating and reciting prayers with family and friends. The cool breeze of autumn is slowly replacing the almost relentless summer humidity and students are suiting up for their first days of school. It's football season, again, too, with every team hopeful for a long, winning record. Anything is possible, it seems. And so, in between my mouthfuls of comfy New Year food and sitting at shul, listening to the sound of the blaring shofar, I start to think of the year that has just passed me by, and the one coming right up. This last year has been, for lack of a better word, eventful. As I reflect on my 5:00 am engagement, our weekend away to celebrate alone and then all the wonderful calls, e-mails, hugs, cards, and other forms of well wishes from family and friends, I feel very happy. Then I turn my head to the next year, which will undoubtedly offer more excitement (and more planning) as our nuptials draw nearer and nearer. June will be here before you know it, many people have told me, and I believe them. But as much as the new year is a time of celebration, of bonding with family and looking forward to a new beginning, of endless possibilities, it is a time of reflection. Of thinking of how you may have wronged others, or yourself, in the previous year and repenting and trying to make right in the year to come. A new year isn't only a fresh start, but also an improvement on you lived the year before. That's why, next week, I'll put aside the savory foods and fast for a day. Remembering the wrongs and trying to make this next year--and all the exciting promise it holds--a bit sweeter.