My daughter Rose and I met up with my parents for a chilly walk on Lucy Vincent Sunday afternoon. At the entrance to the beach, we met an acquaintance who had recently lost his wife to cancer. “May I join you?” he asked, “I’m lonely.” Something about his honesty put us all at ease. He said his wife had painted many pictures of this beach, and that he was surrounded by her art and jealous of the pieces that were sold. It was as if he still longed to gather every last fragment of her and hold them near. My heart ached a little, and opened.
He asked what I had been doing. “Plodding along,” I said, instantly kicking myself. Plodding along?! What is that? This man would have understood better than many how I had felt myself coming into the winter season with an intense need for pleasure and for rest. He would have understood my excitement at reading that the word “SAVOR” is from the Latin root for wisdom.
That is what I mean to do: to savor the slow and smokey winter sweetness of my days- to look mindfully at the details with gratitude and appreciation and perhaps even a poet’s eye; to breathe of them whole-heartedly; to drink them fully; to hold my family close; to practice beauty- the love of it if not the manufacture.
At home, the door, simple objects, all took on a new luminosity.
And the sun reached in across a kitchen counter, illuminating our abundance: onions, coffee, winter squash…
