Little Moments

For the past couple of months, it has been ridiculously cold in New Orleans. Please no comments from all our friends further north. There is no argument that is even colder where you are; it's just that New Orleanians are not at all accustomed to freezing temperatures and thus have not equipped their houses to handle sustained periods of cold. This explains the fact that in our apartment only one of our two window units supplies heat.

Tuesday of this week was a particularly cold, dreary, blustery day. Both of us spent the day out of the apartment. I was in class and working all day and Matt spent the day in the library working on a research paper. So by the time I got home on Tuesday around 9, it was pretty chilly in our place. I immediately turned on all possible warming units: the heater in the bathroom, the window unit with heat, and the stove. When Matt got home about 30 minutes later, dinner was ready and the heat was on full blast, but it was still FREEZING. We began to fix our plates and sit down at the table when Matt jokingly suggested that we eat in the bathroom, which, at that point was the warmest room in the apartment thanks to the room's size and the super-efficient heater/fan attached to the light. Despite his obvious jest and the ridiculousness of his suggestion, I took him up on the offer. We carried our dinner and 2 kitchen chairs into the bathroom and closed the door.

So there we set for the next 30 minutes, knee to knee in our tiny bathroom eating dinner, sharing stories about our day and generally enjoying the experience. When we were finished eating dinner there was a definite hint of sadness, partly because we were going to have to face the arctic temperatures in the other rooms of the apartment but mostly because our 'little moment' was over. We were about to start working on other more serious things like studying, writing papers, filling out reports.

Over the past couple of days, I've thought about our dinner on Tuesday night and how easy it would have been for us to miss that moment. I could have easily teased back with a "Yeah, right", and we would have eaten dinner quickly in the cold kitchen and hurried into the slightly less cold bedroom/living room to begin our night's work. I am so glad we didn't miss that chance to break from the drudgery of our day, and to truly connect with one another, because that little moment is a memory we will cherish forever.

So today I'm grateful for all the little moments that sneak into our days and embed themselves in our memories and make life more fun.