Hello, Dear Reader

In the still of January, I find myself reflecting on life. With the noise and distractions of the festivities gone, amidst the returning tranquility of the mundane, I attend to these thoughts in the ever repeating fashion of yearly retrospection. 

This could be in part due to the fact that I am turning thirty this year, and most of my childhood memories seem distant, almost as if they were from another life altogether. The earliest of my memories, as I recall it, is an early morning with my grandparents, along with a scent of freshly brewed coffee, a mahogany round table, and a view of the Andes mountains. My grandfather sits at the table, reading the newspaper attentively while my grandmother sets the table for the three of us, humming a tune of domestic bliss.

In this fading childhood memory I am (perhaps) seated in the centre of the table with a direct view of the mountains. The reds and oranges of dawn blending harmoniously with the greenish hue of the dense forest, almost as if someone had woken up at twilight to watercolour the landscape before me. I cannot recall what was spoken, what else was set on the table nor if anyone else was in the room that day. It is now just a mute memory; a mental clip playing on an eternal loop. 

And while that memory was and is for the most part a happy one, it has since been tinged with melancholy, for my grandparents have long left this world and I have never again seen the same blend of colours as that one sunrise. Time has taken all tangibility from this memory, and surely one day, it will take the memory altogether. Yet, in what seems like a game of give and take, time has allowed me to make new memories in a life and marriage of my own. The smell of freshly brewed coffee still fills the air, although it is now me brewing it in the mornings as my husband sets our rectangular oak table for two. 

Perhaps this is a small yet ephemeral victory over time;  a devotion to silent rituals of love that will one day become memories of their own.