Cold winter's night

I have been feeling full---our home is full of good things. We have greenery and twinkling pieces of the rainbow lighting it. We sit next to our lit tree at night and talk about our days. We hold cups of warm cider in one hand and hold hands with the other, and we feel so blessed we might burst.

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But the thing is that November was a hard month, and December has started the same. We saw each other far less than we’d like. My strength and my expectations did not join. The past week, I've had the flu.

So here I sit in the usual tension of the present, full, and yet longing. While I hold what I’ve found in New York—watching the rain fall so far in lit streets, a grocery store that plays 50s music---and know someday they will be framed on the wall of memories I want to relive, I still ache for the last place. It sidles up to me again, that urge to place everything not perfect on this new place. I cried when I saw Edinburgh stairs in a movie yesterday. The past becomes story the minute we walk out of it, but there were hard days there, too. The truth is, actually, that I used to hate treking up those stairs to the Royal Mile.

The thing is? Be in joy. Because it is here, and if I step outside it, the place where I’m standing is hard. It is teaming with people, rushing people, who want to be first into the subway car. It is little sleep. It is lonely. In joy, there is fullness. The corridor between the firs for sale outside the grocery store smells piney. Opening the bursting pomegranate is treasure. A bowl of warm soup and a candle are luxuries. Walking and feeling the wind push back is novel. Normal has been wrapped into a gift thanks to the flu.

It is raining in Brooklyn and that means the streetlights touch the sidewalks more often in puddles there, and there, and there.

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It's a cold winter night, but His hand is here, and there, and there where you are, too.