There’s a pot of potato soup at a slow simmer on the stove.  Everything about this day is slow.  Unhurried.  Leisurely.  Unfolding gently from the dark of predawn to the sunset at 5:07 pm. It is a day to burrow into all the comforts that make home home.  Pumpernickel bread is baking and the house is filled with the smell of caraway seed.  Irish butter was procured for the bread and mulled cider will round out the evening menu though Louisa is considering making gingerbread for dessert.  She nestles deeper into the chair as she considers the expenditure of energy that will take. 

Gingerbread would be good.  There is heavy cream to turn into whipped cream, but the kitchen is spotless, and she is not sure she wants to clean it again.  Louisa ponders.

Royce is napping upstairs.  She figures she has the house to herself for another hour.  He is a marathon sleeper.  No 20-minute power naps for him. He says anything less than two hours is not worth his time.

The house is silent except for the hum of the furnace and the purrs of the cat.

She has not had the television on at all this day and silenced her phone several hours ago. 

Louisa is hibernating in the peace she and Royce have built in their 30 years of marriage.  All the rough edges have smoothed.  They fit together like the two halves of the yin-yang. Both are strong personalities, but they have long worked out their friction points without giving up their identities.  They are not two shall become one,  but two that curve together in all the right places. 

It was a lot of work. These past six, seven years have been ones of ease and plenty.  Love and friendship.  Passion and camaraderie.  He still makes her laugh.  She still makes him think.

The forecast called for just flurries, but Louisa estimates there are two inches of flurries accumulated on the back deck.  There is no place she needs to be.  There is nothing she should be doing.  All that concerns her is whether she wants to make gingerbread or not.

She decides that the smell of gingerbread baking will heighten further this intense feeling of contentment.  The warmth of it will further keep at bay the bluster of the outside world.

Can contentment be intense?  Is that an oxymoron?

She whispers a small prayer:  May all beings know this feeling.  But she doesn’t dwell on it.  She does not want to consider the reality of the the all-too real world.

She wants this day to go on and on.