On Boxing Day

By the fire

The fire in the grate is consuming the last of the firewood, and the year is dying down too. This evening we saw not only our daughter and her family in London (all of them confined indoors, afflicted by the Virus despite multiple vaccinations) but also my sister in Wales and even our son and grandson in Australia, about to start their breakfast. These rare whole-family encounters make me feel emotional. As I was ending the meeting, clicking on the red box to make the participants disappear, words from Rückert's poem Sei mir gegrüßt sprang to mind:

Ein Hauch der Liebe tilget Raum und Zeiten ...

which to the likely embarrassment of my friends and relations I posted on Facebook. One breath of love obliterates space and time, is what it means.

Family gathering by Zoom

It has felt like a long year, the first year we have spent in just one country for a very long time. Mustn't complain. Our not travelling is good for the environment, so I should think of it as off-setting. The only journeys we undertook in 2021 were our short flights to Mont Joli in August and Kingston in October, and our drive to Montreal in November. Those weren't new destinations for us, which feels like another shortfall. Still, I ought not to think like that. The cerebral explorations that have taken the place of terrestrial journeys often felt satisfying. My husband always claims that you can live adventurously without leaving home, and I've had a glimpse of what he means, this year.

We began studying an aria by Bach this week.