Sometimes it IS the "Little Things"....

So little, so pretty....but what's inside is always so impactful....

...2 of my favorite pictures I carry with me literally wherever I go....

The doldrums of a very cold, icy and snow-dumped-on January can get to folks and this is nothing to be ashamed of especially when so many of us are house-bound with colds, other illnesses, ancy children on snow-days and even blown-out back discs...

Unless you're living in a ski town and able to get outside to take advantage of all of this winter's snowfall (yes, you my dear friends and former neighbors out there so luckily in Park City, UT), a colder than usual winter month like this one is turning out to be can be quite, well, challenging.

Tomorrow I am going to brave the cold temps here and actually drive a car for the first time in weeks. I am anxious to get back over to our in-town cottage and then hopefully the next day, drive the five minutes commute to my fun part-time job and work a couple of hours over there.

Relegating one's world to a bedroom, to the corner of one's bedside where a small table is stacked with books, magazines, hand lotion, water in plastic tumblers capped off with a top and bendable straw for ease of drinking and such gets....small, very small and yet sometimes it indeed IS the "little things" that make a huge difference in where we are and how we are dealing with being where we are....

For me here, one of the nicest small-but-big things has been the beautiful bouquet of roses James brought me yesterday. They're blooming-out now so full n' lush and the scent has been soothingly reminiscent of gardening days past and yet to come. It's always so amazing to me how much flowers or a potted flowering plant can add into both an atmosphere and one's own psyche'. He grabbed this at the grocer's and it has made such a wonderful impact indeed.

Another small thing that I keep nearby year-round is the flat, paper picture frame which was once my Grandmother Wylly's and now I enjoy using. I keep in it two of my very favorite photos and will probably be peering at these in some nursing home on down the line: both are of James and my 2 truly magical years of being ski-bums out in Utah. One picture is us posing in front of the mountain pass beyond which perches our beloved miner's cottage on the sloped streets in Park City's historic district. The other photo is of James and I after we climbed up Double-Arch in Utah's Arches National Park out there in the desert lands of Moab. Still to this day, we count those two all-too-brief years as our happiest married-life adulthood years together. Of course we're having a nice time now and enjoying the present with one another and are glad to be here in our home-grounds of the Deep South but there'll always be something-magical about our Utah time.... just opening this up and looking at the pictures makes me smile.

Our world can be all too easily a landscape of "bigger is better", "grander gestures are greater" and "lots is preferred over just a little" but I disagree to a degree....me a lover of cottages, small poetry books, petite four cakes, strands of simple pearls, a single bloom in a silver bud vase, a kiss on the forehead, a door opened and held, sporty roadster cars, a bottle of wine shared, a postcard in the mail, a hug, a steaming mug of tea and so many, many gestures done to someone or done to oneself that speak the language of "Little Things...big of impact and large of meaning."

Here's to you treating yourself and the ones you care about and care literally for with something little and yet oh, so wonderfully lit with largess this month- best to everyone, Lachlan