Sarah's CircleFriends are blessings that sustain our journeys. |
Joy is what we all are looking for, not happiness, but joy. It is what I gave my daughter for her middle name, Joy. It is fleeting, and yes, it comes mostly from moments with the family, or for me, in music. This Christmas I found joy in the most unlikely place. Let me explain.
To get our vitamin C daily, we make sure to have an orange, usually cut up on our oatmeal. But recently I have been buying the little tangerines, called “cuties” or “haloes.” They are just the right size, one for each, and easy to peal. Yesterday morning, as I peeled mine and smelled the citrus zest, I flashed a memory from my childhood. Every Christmas Eve we drove an hour to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for dinner and presents with my mom’s brothers’ families. There, on a round wooden plate in the living room, were the year’s first tangerines. In those days oranges wouldn’t arrive in Minnesota until well after New Years’, but tangerines appeared just in time for Christmas. They signaled the zest of a new year coming, the taste of something foreign to Minnesota, but wonderful! Yesterday, as I breathed in the scent of that tangerine, it all came back: the wonder of Christmas, the caroling with my cousins, the tasting of Swedish delicacies that my aunts had made and brought, the blue-lit Christmas tree in Grandma’s living room, around which we opened the hand-made presents of woolen mittens and hats, always the same, except for the colors. There were nine of us grandchildren, and she must have started knitting in early fall. Joy is simple; joy comes from all our senses; joy can be missed if we are too busy; and joy is never to be missed. It’s too important! --Cynthia
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
January 2022
To subscribe and receive notification of new posts, download a feed reader:
RSS Feed Reader then click the RSS Feed button above. |