the migrant wife

A certain weight in life can only be eased by a plate of fresh, warm cookies. Weight that multiplies in the cloud of anxiety, that entangles itself with hormones and tiredness and the yearning for the elusive “next thing”, that finds you balancing budgets and writing emails through hot tears. A sharp sting that intrudes your blissful solitude, that somehow pierces through the thick darkness which was meant to cushion you from its harm. A heaviness that can’t find its way out in words, only weighty thumping of the heart, shallow breathing, clammy palms. When an embrace becomes the only language you understand, and shared silence the only lullaby that soothes.

That’s when you know the best next thing to do is to get a stick of warm butter and whisk it light with sugar (hopefully unrefined sugar), adding in egg and a dollop of vanilla essence before folding and mixing in the flour, baking powder and salt (don’t ask). Freezing it before cooking in the oven when sweet warm buttery chocolate scents waft over, awaken senses, lure, entice, beckon me to taste it’s golden goodness.

There’s nothing so special about those cookies, apart from the fact that they were freshly made, and perhaps that it was unrefined sugar that was used. You just forgot about how good they were. There’s something about small pockets of perfection and joy, that we often miss. Something like looking through a pair of binoculars in a bird hide on a windswept day, searching for dainty wood warblers, or orange chested redstarts, or quick, bright yellowhammers, or the sweet hermit thrush, in the distance and among the branches, only to miss the monarch butterfly seeking refuge and rest on the wooden hatch inches away from your finger… its beauty and delicateness, simplicity and glory overlooked, because you had a pair of binoculars over your eyes. No, there is beauty in the now, glory in the simple, we in the ordinary – only possible in a world created and sustained by a beautiful, glorious, awesome Creator. Something so small as a plate of cookies reflect, in a small, infinitely miniature way, something of the Love that only He gives – so quiet, so humble, but so tangible. So… Real.