As morning light stipples the concrete floors of our house, my wife Billie and I take down the past year’s calendars, those marked and re-marked with twelve months of music lessons and birthday parties, dance recitals and teacher conferences—the events that fill and drain the weeks of the year like water cycling through the soft stone fountain of a Sonoran courtyard. It is jueves, Thursday, three days after Christmas and three days before the new year. On walls the colors of desert wildflowers, the calendars advertise glossy rooflines in January and red canyons in August, emperor penguins in April and crested rockhoppers in October.

Every year we are reluctant to toss the old calendars out as we hang the new ones in their place. Perhaps we are afraid of throwing away something of ourselves, the scribbled squares that amount to a diary of the year; or if not a diary, then a medley—the resonant pitch of viola on Wednesday from three to three forty-five against the pirouettes of ballet on Monday from four to five-thirty. Or the monthly art itself may restrain us. Not every entrancing landscape or black-and-white portrait can be saved, but the photograph of Liv Tyler as the elf princess Arwen—the one with the misty forest background where pale skin is backlit as if in a dream of twilight, the black hair tinged with cobalt to reveal an apex of elvin ear—maybe that one we could keep? Billie sighs and hands me a new calendar.

Outside, the half-moon dips beneath a wintry line of clouds as light rain appears—not falling exactly, but filling the cold Arizona air from within. Inside, our daughters sleep as we ready the van for the day’s journey: Tucson to Alamos, Sonora, an eleven-hour drive from the lush Sonoran highlands to the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental, to an almost unfathomable mix of cactus, deciduous hardwoods, and tropical evergreens known as Sinaloan thornscrub. Before we leave, we complete the ritual of changing the calendars so when we return in January, the days will be unmarked and we may begin anew, or at least without schedule.