(Note: Kathy Bradley has written more than 700 columns in the past 30 years for the Statesboro Herald. She was asked to select her favorite one. She chose the one below that was published in the Herald on January 1, 2006.)

Hard to believe it is January already. It startles me every year – like a calico cat, languid and unobtrusive, moving along the edges of the room, clearly visible, but not really noticeable, suddenly pouncing into my lap with a look that says, “I know you don’t like me. That is why, out of all the people in this room, I chose you.”

The fields on either side of Sandhill are empty. The corn stalks and peanut vines that occupied long and even rows for so much of the year have disappeared, their fruit long harvested, their skeletal remains burned off and turned under by loud and heavy machines.

The year winds down and the land does nothing. It produces no crop. It provides no cover for rabbits and mice and snakes. It simply is.

I stare out the window at the emptiness. In the sudden halt to activity in the days after Christmas, I keep thinking that there must be something that needs doing. I am looking for something that intrigues me, tells me a story, drives away the chill, but I feel myself becoming frustrated with the silence of a farm asleep.

It is hard sometimes to find beauty in the India ink silhouettes of empty trees, the long black shadows of sagging fence posts, the black-and-white sky.

I remember a song from a Judy Collins CD I got one Christmas. “I’ll learn to love the fallow way,” she sings in that trembling soprano. “When winter draws the valley down and stills the rivers in their storm and freezes all the little brooks.”

Is it possible that I could do that? Learn to love the fallow way?

“Fallow” is a word that doesn’t get used much these days. It is a word for farmers and poets mostly. An adjective, it’s primary definition is “left untilled or unsown after plowing.” It also means, “dormant” or “inactive.” Easy to see why our drive-thru, one-hour, speed-obsessed, convenience-driven society wouldn’t think much of such a word.

What a shame. For it is not only land that needs to be left untilled on occasion. Lying fallow can also be good, I think, for the human heart.

What would it take, I wonder, to allow myself to lie fallow for a while?

I would, like the land, have to yield myself to the fire that burns away the stubble, the broken stalks and dried up vines that, having born their fruit, do nothing but clutter the surface.

I would, like the land, have to allow myself to be turned and plowed up, the rocks and roots brought to the surface and carted away.

I would, like the land, have to be quiet and still, having nothing to do but wait.

The burning, the turning, that is not so difficult when one reaches a certain age. But the waiting. That never gets any easier. Can I do that?

The fields on either side of Sandhill will not be empty for long. Already Daddy is making plans, repairing machinery, watching the sky. Soon the tractors will be grinding their way across the acres, etching deep furrows into the soil, pulling the planters that will drop the seeds.

The song goes on: “As sure as time, as sure as snow, as sure as moonlight, wind and stars,

the fallow time will fall away. The sun will bring an April day and I will yield to Summer's way.”

I open the curtain a little wider. There is a promise hovering in the cold gray air, a promise that, for the one who is willing to surrender, the fallow time is hard, but never long.

(Why Kathy chose the above column: From its first publication this column got a lot of attention from readers and has remained one about which people comment. I think the idea of starting over, beginning again is common to us all, but most of what is presented to us along those lines carries the theme of reinvention or self-improvement, e.g., New Year's resolutions.

Any person who has lived long enough and/or knows anything at all about sowing and reaping can find in the concept of fallow ground an affirmation of who and what he/she has been, is, and still has an opportunity to be in the future.

Even 20 years later, I specifically remember the morning I sat in my reading chair staring out the window at the fields and being struck by the beauty of the barrenness and the promise it held and then putting it down in words.)