The refrigerator rumbles this morning. I cannot ignore it. In an unusually silent house, the noise fills the empty kitchen. The house is missing the sounds of June as much as I am craving the silence of the morning. Where is the boy who looks after the sheep? He’s under the haystack fast asleep. The lyrics of the old nursery rhyme my mother always loved instinctively slip across my mind like loons landing upon the cool lake, rippling the waters around them. I think of June and how I held her the other afternoon before her nap, reading from the same nursery rhyme book my mother once read. Like the…

In college we ate popcorn and wine for dinner on Friday nights and nobody complained. Life was undefined then. There was no Instagram to tell us what the rest of the campus was doing. We locked ourselves in our home with blankets piled on a black leather sofa and bowls we didn’t take care of until the morning. Digging pennies from the sofa cushions, we would pay our heating bill each month; the cost of living was a brutal reality at 19. Last week, I wrote a letter to an old friend, who used to sit beside me, huddled in warmth all those years ago. I wanted to tell her…

Newly fallen snow seats itself on the bamboo branches outside our dining room window, waiting for the next large gust to take it away. It is Nature’s rule: this coming and going; to protect yourself from the reality of the cold you must keep moving or become frozen. Today is the first day of the New Year. Despite the changes this year, the mega and the micro, it has been a year of steady action that did not overwhelm. In fact, as I begin to think about it, more than anything else, I am grateful for the transition that 2015 initiated in my life– From idea to business, from swollen…