• Save

When we awoke this morning, we found ourselves in the midst of a winter wonderland.  Snow was quickly accumulating.  I found it to be so refreshing.  Our world had been covered in a beautiful blanket of white.  This reduction in contrast softened the distinctions between objects, even blurring the line between earth and sky.   The ground took on gentle slopes, covering the world beneath, leaving only small traces of its former self.    The snow rolled everything into one.  Somehow this image seems like my own worn life path, with most elements camouflaged under a canopy of snow, while others remain visible and present, catching my attention along on the journey.

We had the added blessing of Rob working from home today, since the roads were too treacherous for him to make his morning commute.  The children are reluctantly settling back into routines of home, but it is taking some time.  So my two year old made frequent checks on my husband to ‘see what he was doing,’ despite my best efforts to explain the situation.   I dream of a day when he doesn’t have to work outside the house.  Today was a bit of an experiment of what that might be like.  From all reports on his end he was reasonably productive despite the soundtrack of our home.  I thought it was glorious!

While I prepared lunch, Rob had time to enjoy the children.  It was a good day for soup!  I chopped left over veggies from our holiday appetizer trays, used up some leftover turkey stock mixed with meat, added the potatoes still lingering from Christmas dinner, diced the celeriac that had patiently watited at the back of our fridge through the holidays, and some carrots from the autumn harvest.  The result was apparently a good one, since conversation over lunch turned to how one goes about creating a good soup.  I opted for the appropriate use of salt, while Rob felt it was the layering of subtle flavour textures that made it a success.

I found it hard not to draw a connection between the blanketing of our world with snow and the blending of a soup.  In each, the details are lost to uniformity, but the end result holds all of the beauty of what once was.  In combination,  something more beautiful and magical is created.

I love how January offers the opportunity to lay a new blanket of snow.  How each new day is its own blended soup.  And when my eldest son raced up the stairs after his rest time, bounding toward the window exclaiming, “Our footprints from this morning are almost gone!”  I was reminded how blanketing and blending are constant processes in our home…when we take the time to notice them.