Let it Snow !

The best thing about Christmas is that everything shuts down or shifts into a lower gear.  There is less blah in the air when everyone is busy loading and unloading the dishwasher.  The focus is taken off high anxiety topics for a few days, it seems.  I certainly didn’t bother to scroll down the Google headlines before logging on to womazzle.  I really don’t want to know what the boys are up to these days....!!!

Just let it snow!

silent

I bathed my fire in the sea

And locked my storm inside that rock

It seems my heart fell silent then

No song has filled my lungs

Of all the tributes I have paid

None has been so dear

To walk this road in silence now

The snow unmarked appears

(AeJordan)

Toxic Trauma

I just got used to the idea of replacing the spoonfuls of sugar in my coffee with copious amounts of milk given all the negative press sugar has been receiving over the past years.  

Already I had cut down on my chocolate caramel shortbread consumption after the bad fats hype, so I was  quite confident to be on a healthy track.

But helas!  Apparently more than 300ml of milk a day is likely to kill you prematurely as well....!  Go figure.

So I cut out coffee altogether as of two weeks ago and redirected my hot drink addiction to spiced tea, preferably cinnamon, the tasty cholesterol lowering bark that makes a cup of watery brew halfway enjoyable.

But it seems like I can’t win.  

Apparently now cinnamon has become the new baddy -  especially the cheaper Chinese variety one would find in a tea bag or Christmas cookie.

  

What’s next?  

Water.  

Wanta bet?!

Not from Now

On December 1st, my great grandmother Johanna was born.  She died age eighy-six in 1972 after helping me learn how to walk and talk.  She had big, veiny hands which had seen lots of wood piles, hand axes and water buckets.  

With these hands she planted seeds in the spring and harvested cabbage and carrots in the summer.  She stictched me a pillow case when I was little, which, tattered and torn as it became over time, still remains one of my most treasured possessions.  

Together with my granpa’s old paper scale and my great auntie’s candy jar, it links me to a time that was mine in many ways more than the one I inhabit today.