Time for Home

It’s late on a Friday afternoon, and we are heading into a cold January night.  As I wind down my workday, I started a fire in the wood stove, our secondary heat source.  Within the hour, the living room will be deliciously cozy.

It’s a simple dinner tonight – rice, broccoli, dumplings and Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken, a house favorite, and easy to put together for me, since I’m a little tired and sleep deprived after a late night arrival home from my work trip. Fancy dinner it isn’t, but combined with a warm fire and a movie, it’s about as perfect as it can get, with one exception – we’re a week or so away from Eli being with us full time, and despite the homestretch, it’s starting to feel a bit too long.

Tomorrow there will be plenty of time for scratch cooking and chores.  This weekend I will finish putting away all the Christmas decorations and start preparing for the next phase of our winter  – decluttering and preparing for spring.

There’s always too much to do here at Sithean, but post-holiday winter has a particular form of silence and peace to it that allows me to take moments of rest and enjoy the life that I have built so far.  Most of my time is about rushing to do all the things that need and want to be done, but there’s something about a January weekend that allows me to take a breath.  It reminds me of that Edith Sitwell quote “Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire; it is the time for home”

And so it is.  No matter what happens during the week, with rare exception, Fridays are our nights at home.  They are family time, time to pour a glass of wine and relax, with the whole weekend ahead of us.  Far from a constraint, Fridays at home are cherished.

It’s an evening to feel lucky and blessed.  We have so much – warmth, good food, family, love – Fridays are the one evening when gratitude is not a struggle for me, it isn’t lost in the noise of the to-do list, or the things I wish I had accomplished.  This is the evening where everything, just as it is, is right with the world.

I wish you the happiest of Fridays.