Wednesday, February 24, 2010

les petits riens de la vie

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Like {Marisa}, I don't speak French – but when she wrote about coming across this sweet French phrase, I had to scribble it into my journal for safekeeping.

les petits riens de la vie

Literally meaning "the small ones nothing of life," it is more commonly translated to mean, "the little nothings of life."

I love that.

Because isn't that what all of life is made of anyways?

Bad breath yawns in the morning followed by tight-lipped kisses under sheets, careful not to share the tangy taste of teeth and tongue.
Blind steps toward the iridescent bathroom light, peeling crust out of eyes while peeing and having the morning's first thoughts (or worries) all simultaneously.
Blasé meetings that give the chance to closed-mouth yawn and silently read a poem and reflect on the morning under afternoon sunlight's vast perspective.
Blurry nights that tend toward sleep in the most necessary sense, but before, the clean mugs scrubbed, ready for another morning, a chipped nail, a sweet email read under the electric blanket.

It is this. These little nothings that get me through long weeks, strung together in the grey of February.
And sometime between milky dawn and drowsy dusk I decide this:

That I am ready for March.
I am ready with the giddy expectation that April will come after that, and then May, and there will be relief from this cold, white coating on freezing black concrete.

I wear jeans and flats, sans socks, in denial that hibernation has not yet come to an end. But March comes on Monday, so there is not too much time to wait.

So, as my feet freeze, I look forward to slippers and blankets warmed by electricity tonight. Of finishing the last forty page of the rather large, and rather great book I have been sojourning through for months now. It too has been one of the little nothings I have come to savor and expect – like snow underfoot on the mornings I choose to keep socks tucked in drawers instead of wrapping translucent feet.

My aim is to make the minutes slow, even in my cold, barren state, because I know that nothing lasts forever and I force myself to find a hundred little nothings here

right now

to believe in

to get me through this season.




les petits riens de la vie





2 comments:

CitricSugar said...

Beautifully written, Jess.

The Harringtons said...

somehow you make even winter sound bearable :-)
-Leanne

 
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