The tale of peace.

“Patience” is what the dial points to now.

The winter that passed was the most excruciating winter endured, to date. It was bone-chilling and skin-flaying. It was exposed heart and blood and nerve. It was icy black water seeping in through the door and the only signs of the house’s occupants are the drowning air bubbles escaping to freedom the way their owners could not.

But the mistress of the land and the owner of the house is home again and and she has begun to spring clean and the floors are gleaming white and clean and the books are no longer toppled over but upright and stacked and the curtains are thrown back and light is reaching in with tentative fingers.

The demons, unheard winter-long, clamor and rouse and bang heavy fists on her door and speak in garbled tongue but she opens her home and offers patience like tea and puts into language every single unintelligible sound and unuttered howl. And they leave, quiet, sated, docile as lambs.

And the people knock and knock and bring complaints and problems and little disasters, and she opens her home again and offers them patience like tea and untangles their messy yarn-balls of problems and offers them new yarn.

And the garden dares to grow again. Shoots pluck up their courage and push through the soil to take a peek and flowers venture, bold as you please, to put out their skirts and begin to unfurl again and the trees, the old, mighty sentinels whose roots spread across the entire land and hold it together in their unwavering, steadfast, grasp, stretch toward the sun again and groan in relief after a winter’s worth of making themselves small.

How good it is to be home.