An early winter.

It’s hard to believe it’s taken me a year to blog these very precious memories with my brother and sister. My siblings are like pieces of my heart that only came to form after they were born; two of my safest places, they carry the parts of me I often cannot. They know me inside-out and they love me anyway.

So when they were here and I saw them both for the first time in almost a year, I felt both whole and shattered—whole because they were here and they felt like home; shattered because I knew our time would come to an end soon. I curse the part of me that often cannot sit with the present; always waiting for the other shoe to drop, that thing around the corner, I pull myself away from the moment I could be enjoying instead of just being there. I try to take that deep breath—to take it a day at a time—but sometimes it’s too late, and it gets away from me.

This day, however, was a day in which I was able to stay mostly in the present—to share in the magic of our early winter with them, to sit with our lunch in the cold and experience the sheer joy of just being.