-20°C. The world has frozen.

We were out the whole day yesterday. It was another Sabbath full of beautiful nature, extreme temperature (my camera stopped working after couple of shots - it was too cold for the poor thingy), birdwatching, good people, tea, fireplaces, laughter, a few tears, and my auntie's pancakes. My dad is back to work from February and I'll hit the road in a month's time, and in a strange way I will miss those Sabbath mornings when two of us could get in the car and go anywhere and do anything. I guess there's something beautiful and memorable even in the hardest of times.

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There are only a few other things that leave me touched and humbled in a way my friends' words do. Over the past month or so a number of people have told me that they've been somehow blessed by my blog, my words and thoughts. It makes my heart so very glad to hear it. I'm glad I haven't had to go through hardship, alone and quiet. I'm glad I've been able to voice my feelings, share some of my experiences, and give meaning to things that might seem meaningless to bystanders. And mostly I'm thankful and glad for people who've taken time to hear some stories about my mum, stories that are so very dear and precious to my heart.

I received a message from K. two days ago (greetings to California!) and she put things into words in such a beautiful way I actually teared up, reading these lines. She shared Don Miller's quote (of course, haha) and reminded a story from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about his Uncle Art's passing that I had already forgotten. “That night when my mother called, I stopped working. I closed my laptop and remembered Uncle Art standing at his father’s grave. I knew he wouldn’t die, because his life was like the roots of a tree that went into the soil and miles around its trunk and came up in my cousins, in their faces and their voice and their character. I didn’t think you could kill a tree that big. Not even God could kill a tree that big." And she said she sees my mum as a tree whose roots go further and stronger in a way that they strengthen other people's trees even now when hers has fallen. Exactly the words I needed to hear. Thank you, K., from the bottom of my heart.

So I'll keep telling my story and her stories as well as I can. And I love the idea that my friends can get to know her just a tiny bit that way. The last Sabbath I sat on her bed side I told her a lot of stories about my friends, especially my Newbold friends, and I saw how much she longed to meet them all in person. I'm terribly sorry for the fact that she only met a few of them on this side of Jordan. But I like the idea of my friends getting to know her through me so that when that long-awaited Day of Restoration dawns, there will be a whole bunch of people greeting her as if they knew her well. And then I'll be like, 'So, mum, you finally meet them, here's this person I told you about and there's that person I mentioned. And you wouldn't believe but they all know you already.'