Aught-Six to Aught-Seven, part 1

It's the last day of 2006 and I'm asleep in the passenger seat of my mom's battered mini-van. We are driving through Northwest Oregon, on the way home after our annual year-end weekend family reunion. I'm starting to get a cold.
The roads and the scenery are familiar -- single lane highways that dip, curve and climb through grass seed farms, Douglas Fir forests and two-diner towns. In the distance, green, rolling hills fade farther than you can see and look patchworked by clearcutting.
I blink my eyes open occasionally, catch lazy half-glimpses of the world through the windshield. Everything is grey, desaturated. We are driving beneath a cloudy, colorless sky that seems to be holding back all of the rainbow frequencies of midafternoon sunlight.
The past year drains away, fading to whispers of grey. Maybe it's just the comforting rhythm of quiet cartrips, but I feel world slowly and surely shifting. 2007 is not yet here, but it is coming. Across the world, it's already begun.
Our New Year's Eve is surely irrelevant and arbitrary on a cosmic scale -- it's simply the day we chose to end our calendar -- but as our wheels turn atop the shifting planet and I watch the grey and white landscape, eyes half shut, it feels like a true new year is surely on its way.