Everything looks so clean and simple now: no rolls of wrapping paper leaning in a corner of the dining room, no Christmas tree. No angels on the mantel, no little old wooden village on the cupboard shelves. Nothing red, if you don't count the dining room walls, and nothing green, if you don't count the kitchen walls and the leaves of plants. I find myself longing for orange, loving the sight of clementines in a bowl, of orange flowers in a watercolor Q's mother painted years ago. Loving the orange spine of a cookbook.
We love things in cycles, I think. The coziness of Christmas lasts just long enough so that we don't tire of it, and then it is time to move out into the world, into something a bit more spacious. In a new year, new things feel more possible. Perhaps things need not always be as they have always been.
For each of us, then, two proper places: one in which to cuddle under a nice blanket when we know it's time to retract, and one from which to venture forth into something fresh and new. And the wisdom to discern the shift in the season. None of us should do only one or the other, not all the time. We must all come home, and we must all leave again.
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