New Year’s Day

New Year’s Day is the date of a household crisis that turns weeks of unexplained noise into a tangible discovery. At seven in the morning, a yowl draws Cheryl Strayed and her husband to the closet ceiling, where they uncover two kittens trapped in the building’s dark interior.

The Morning’s Discovery

The sound had been audible for three weeks, but on New Year’s Day it became unmistakable. Strayed and her husband woke to the yowling and traced it to the ceiling of their closet. Her husband took a hammer and used its claw end to tear into the plaster, sending chalky chunks down over their clothes. Within ten minutes, he had removed almost the entire ceiling. The pounding stopped the noise; when they fell silent and looked into the opening, two kittens appeared at its jagged edge.

The Date’s Narrative Role

The scene moves from uncertainty to direct evidence: what might have been an imagined or vanished sound becomes the presence of two living animals. The kittens are skeletal, visibly shaking, and caked in soot, spiderwebs, and black grease. Their arrival makes the damage to the closet secondary to the urgent discovery that something had been trapped above it. New Year’s Day therefore anchors the moment when the couple’s persistent listening becomes action, and action reveals the source of the sound.