It’s the final slow morning of this long winter’s holiday. I’m warming up the coffee machine and writing down some notes from the last day and day ahead. Tomorrow, this slow calm is replaced by going back to work.

It’s a quiet and bitter cold first morning of the year for me. I took the dog outside in the zero degrees F dark, and then she went right back to her warm bed. I’m ready for my second cup of coffee while the first tiny bit of dawn is starting to differentiate the one-black sky from the mountain. All in all, it’s much like any early morning this winter, albeit far colder after this week’s snowstorms have moved on. A lot of things in the past week have made it hard to feel reflective on the close out of the past year and start of the next. Here’s hoping for resolution of those uncertainties and a chance at some calm, some restoration, and maybe also some joy in 2022.