This morning felt different.

It wasn’t just because I put my gloves on for the first time in a year. I’d been delaying doing that - putting off putting them on as long as I could bear it. Wearing gloves is an indulgence, like waiting for baked mince pies to cool enough to eat. The feeling of wearing old gloves for the first time in the cold embers of another year is the same feeling as being six again, and having your mother hold your hand as she walks you to school. Everything is going to be okay. You know this because it’s cold, and yet your hand is warm. You are looked after - you won’t fall over or get lost. You are loved.

I liked the sound my feet made, obliterating the frost’s clutches on dead leaves with each step - crunch crunch crunch. I walk on gingerbread men. The ice on the gravel and concrete is a sluice in December - a quaint festive deathtrap for the careless or elderly who don’t want to go downhill fast to Archway or Muswell Hill today, but don’t have much choice in the matter if they don’t take extra care.

And despite it all - the frost, the unbearably slow pace, the relentlessly cold air and my toes, frozen in tattered Canadian shoes - I didn’t feel pulled back. I didn’t feel heavy and useless as I’ve become accustomed to feeling. I felt pushed forward. I felt someone had taken my warm hand, snug in my cosy blue gloves from Holland, and I was being lead. Not in resignation but in trust.

Patience. Patience.

I walked carefully towards a brilliant white light, suspicious of thinking it was at the end of any tunnel as I had of recent fast approaching trains, and yet content to just be moving once again, not afraid of slipping on the frost. Not afraid of failure, so long as I had the chance to keep on going. Not afraid of this coming Friday.

When I got to work, just outside the front door, I found a ring. It was a simple silver loop, a little dented with age, just lying in a frozen pool of sunlight. Sitting here now I keep turning it over and over, wondering what it is (a wedding ring? An engagement ring? A simple piece of machinery?); wondering about the hand that could have worn it; wondering if the answer has, yet again, got to be love.

Patience. Patience.

Patience is its own reward.