Sunday, Poured Slowly

“Not all sacraments are taken in chapels—some are stirred gently in a saucepan and shared in silence.”

It was still early enough that the house held its breath—that precious hour when the morning light filtered through our kitchen curtains with gentle hesitancy, casting everything in shades of amber and possibility.

The kind of quiet that arrives not by accident but by alignment—of timing, temperature, temperament. A convergence so rare in our household that it felt almost sacred. Something to be treasured rather than taken for granted.

This was a silence earned through the accumulated exhaustion of the week’s battles, through the natural rhythm of bodies finally surrendering to rest. Not the brittle hush of tension, when someone had said too much and everyone else was afraid to breathe wrong. Nor the thin, sharp quiet that trailed behind an argument like the scent of smoke, making us all walk carefully around the burnt edges of whatever had been said.

No—this was something else entirely. Soft-bellied. Benevolent. The kind of lull that allowed even the walls to exhale—just as I did now, standing barefoot on the cold linoleum, my toes curling reflexively against the chill that always settled in the kitchen overnight.

My fingers were curled around the heat-warped handle of my most faithful saucepan—the small aluminium one that had lost its non-stick coating years ago and wore the layered scars of countless mornings. Its bottom was blackened from that porridge incident when Charles was seven, and the handle had developed a permanent lean that demanded careful handling to avoid disaster. But I trusted it.

For delicate operations requiring patience and gentle heat, it remained unmatched.

I stood waiting for the hot chocolate to thicken just so, watching the mixture with the focused attention of someone who had learned—through bitter, sticky experience—that the line between perfect and ruined could be measured in mere seconds of inattention.

I didn’t usually bother with hot chocolate on weekday mornings—there were simply too many moving parts to manage, too many flurried exits and half-shouted reminders flung into the chaos over the clatter of the final frantic moments before departure.

Weekday mornings belonged to efficiency. To survival. To the ruthless practicality of getting everyone fed, dressed, and out the door with only minor catastrophe.

But Sundays were different.

Sundays asked for slowness. For deliberateness. For intention stitched into the very act of preparation. They allowed room for rituals that weekday breathlessness could not accommodate—for quiet acts of care, unrushed and unadvertised. And maybe just the right amount of indulgence to suggest love without requiring ceremony. The kind of quiet affection that could be stirred into a saucepan and served without announcement.

The scent rose slowly from the warming mixture—sweet and velvety, edged with a hint of vanilla and that particular richness that came from using proper cocoa instead of the instant powder the boys insisted tasted better. There was the faintest trace of scorched milk, a betrayal of the moment I'd let my attention drift to the window, watching a magpie poke with comic determination at something half-buried in the garden bed.

I stirred more carefully now, gripping the worn handle of the wooden spoon, coaxing the clumps gently, guiding them to dissolve with slow, patient circles.

The surface began to shimmer in lazy spirals—like a scrying bowl in some old household ritual, the chocolate swirling in patterns that looked as though they might reveal something, if you stared long enough.

There was comfort in that little alchemy. The transformation of humble things into something more than themselves. Milk, powder, heat, time.

Far more satisfaction than one should reasonably find in a mixture rediscovered behind a sagging hessian sack of red lentils no one remembered buying—lentils that had been loyally gathering dust on the pantry shelf for the better part of a year, as if quietly waiting for someone to find them a purpose.

Behind me, the house held its precious hush with gentle tenacity.

Not complete silence, exactly—that was impossible in a dwelling that had sheltered our family for over a decade, a house that had learned to wear its noise comfortably. It had absorbed the particular sounds that marked a place as thoroughly lived-in: the footfalls, the cupboard doors that never quite closed flush, the soft mutter of pipes remembering their function.

The refrigerator hummed with mechanical resolve, its compressor cycling on and off with the dependable rhythm of something that had long since learned to pace itself for the long haul.

The timber bones of the house creaked from time to time, settling into the weight of morning with small sighs and murmurs, as though the very structure were stretching and shifting after the night’s rest. Familiar. Reassuring.

And then there was Millie, issuing her own steady commentary from her chosen spot beside the sliding door that led to the back patio. Soft snuffles punctuated by the occasional snort drifted into the air as she navigated whatever canine misadventure had captured her dreaming mind. Her paws twitched faintly—phantom movements of chase or play—while her nose remained tucked neatly beneath the fringe of the braided rug she’d claimed as her own three winters ago. This, despite our repeated attempts to redirect her affections toward the more expensive dog bed still gathering dust in the laundry, pristine and perpetually rejected.

I glanced over at her slumbering form and felt my mouth curve into that particular kind of smile reserved for wayward toddlers and old hymnbooks—the kind born of a quiet, well-worn fondness. Gentle amusement mingled with something deeper: tolerance built not on novelty, but on years of witnessing small, persistent habits.

Without looking, I reached for the mugs—left cupboard, second shelf, exactly where they’d resided for the past five years despite countless kitchen reorganisations and periodic suggestions from well-meaning visitors that we might benefit from a more efficient arrangement. Habit guided my hand, my fingers closing around the familiar forms before my eyes had even focused on the cupboard’s interior.

I poured slowly, with the kind of deliberate care that hot chocolate always seemed to deserve. The mixture emerged from the saucepan’s spout in a perfect ribbon—thick enough to coat the spoon, fluid enough to settle smoothly into the mugs below. Its warmth carried on the air, rich and comforting, filling the space with a scent that lifted the entire room into something just shy of indulgent.

Steam rose between the two mugs like an offering. It curled in graceful spirals, ephemeral and elegant, before vanishing into the pale morning light that filtered softly through the blinds.

I breathed it in deeply, letting the warm, chocolate-scented air fill my lungs and spread its particular variety of comfort through my chest. There was something almost medicinal about it—the way the heat seemed to work from the inside out, loosening the small knots of tension that had lodged themselves in my shoulders without me even noticing.

In a world increasingly determined to serve up uncertainty in endless permutations, there weren’t many things left I could count on to deliver this kind of quiet, dependable solace.

But this—this little ritual—remained.

The careful preparation. The familiar mugs. The slow diffusion of warmth between us. One of the precious few constants still intact, still offering its small promise of steadiness in a life that never stopped shifting.

Carrying both mugs with the careful balance of someone who had walked this particular path countless times before, I made my way to the lounge and placed them gently on the wooden tray waiting on the low coffee table.

The tray was another marker of time—an old wedding gift from Noah’s aunt, handed over with warm wishes and mild judgement. It had survived interstate house moves, dozens of Christmases, and the hard elbows of growing children. Its surface bore the ghosts of all those years in the form of faint ring stains and shallow scratches.

Noah’s favourite blanket was already in place—grey wool, properly coarse, stubbornly warm in the way only good, honest woollen goods can be. It was draped across the back of the couch with that particular kind of arrangement he always produced.

Not folded with any sense of geometric pride. Not neatly placed for visual balance. Just... settled.

As though the blanket itself had, through years of repetition, come to understand its purpose without requiring instruction.

A moment later, as if summoned by the sound of ceramic meeting wood—or perhaps by the familiar scent of hot chocolate reaching him wherever he’d been conducting his own quiet morning preparations—Noah appeared in the doorway.

He was shuffling softly across the carpet with that particular gait reserved for early mornings and weekend leisure—unhurried, slightly careful, accompanied by the familiar groan that seemed to rise from somewhere deep in his chest.

To the unfamiliar ear, it might have sounded like complaint. But I had long since learned to translate it properly. It wasn’t dissatisfaction, nor any real discomfort. It simply meant that his back—worn in small, stubborn ways by decades of engine bays and DIY projects—had recognised the hour before the rest of his body had quite caught up with the idea of being vertical.

He lowered himself onto the couch beside me with a long, grateful exhale, as though releasing the last of the night’s stiffness into the waiting cushions. His body eased into place with the quiet contentment of someone returning to a familiar seat after a long journey—not dramatic, just deeply known.

And then, without hesitation—without even glancing to confirm which mug was which—he reached instinctively for the brown one with its tell-tale chip. His hand found it with the same easy certainty that had guided mine only moments earlier in the kitchen.

I didn’t say anything. There was no need.

No need to point out the gesture, or to name the small current of care that passed between us in the motion. I simply lifted the mug from the tray and placed it into his waiting hand. Our fingers brushed briefly in the exchange—a fleeting touch so ingrained in our routine that it barely registered as deliberate, yet remained somehow essential to the completion of this Sunday morning ritual.

The early light was barely brushing the windowpanes—just the faintest suggestion of gold, tender and hesitant, warming the edge of the glass like a shy touch from something uncertain of its welcome.

It was that particular kind of illumination found only on winter mornings, when the sun seemed to approach the world with cautious deliberation, as though it, too, understood that haste would only fracture the sanctity of such rare, unhurried moments.

Outside, beyond the protective barrier of the glass sliding door, the lemon tree stood in crisp silhouette against the expansive canvas of sky. Its leaves hung motionless and dark against the indigo veil of lingering night, each branch perfectly still in the absence of even the lightest breeze.

There was something dignified in its posture, something composed. It stood as though observing some quiet ritual of its own—poised and almost ceremonial, as if it too recognised that Sunday mornings were to be greeted with reverence, not momentum.

The rhythm of the Sabbath demanded a different kind of presence. Slower. More attentive.

We sipped our hot chocolate in companionable silence, the steam rising gently from our mugs and mingling in the space between us.

It was the kind of quiet that required no apology. No commentary. No anxious effort to fill it.

Just presence—uncomplicated, undemanding, and complete in itself.

“I think Millie’s dreaming about chasing that magpie again,” I said eventually, my voice pitched soft enough not to shatter the delicate spell that had settled over our morning. The words emerged almost of their own accord, prompted by the familiar snuffling sounds drifting from her sleeping form beside the sliding door.

Noah grunted in agreement—a sound that carried with it both amusement and the unspoken camaraderie of long-shared domestic terrain. His gaze remained fixed on the gentle swirl of steam rising from his drink, watching it dissolve and re-form with the kind of quiet absorption that made him an excellent companion for moments like these.

“If she catches it, I hope she gets its manners as well.”

I smiled at that—an expression that rose from somewhere deeper than social reflex. A genuine flicker of delight, unforced and full.

The idea of the slightly dim-witted Millie managing to outwit the neighbourhood’s most belligerent bird was so fundamentally absurd that it practically demanded amusement.

The magpie in question had launched what could only be described as a precision airstrike on Charles just last week, during his reluctant attempt at pegging out the washing. It had been a swift, unprovoked ambush—sharp and theatrical—that Charles took as nothing short of a personal vendetta. He’d shouted his outrage skyward with the wounded indignation of someone genuinely convinced they’d been targeted by a long-standing enemy.

The bird, meanwhile, had retreated with what I could only describe as smug efficiency.

Millie had been beside herself—bounding across the yard in wild, hopeful arcs, her tail a banner of chaotic enthusiasm. Not once did she come close to intercepting the magpie, but the effort was wholehearted, and that seemed enough for her.

It had been chaos—glorious, ridiculous, and unmistakably ours.

The kind of household nonsense that would survive long past the bruised ego, becoming one of those indelible family stories retold over barbecues and birthdays, always with exaggerated flaps and shouted imitations of Charles’s righteous fury.

My smile lingered as my eyes drifted to the edge of the lounge, where a small pair of socks lay discarded like tiny casualties of yesterday’s attempted organisation.

One navy. One green. Mismatched, of course—an arrangement so characteristic it barely warranted a sigh.

Jerome’s handiwork, almost certainly. He’d always had what I could only call a unique gift for unintentional asymmetry. Not as an act of defiance, but as though his sense of order operated on a frequency all its own—some internal compass calibrated to a logic the rest of us had never quite managed to tune into.

I should have reminded him to finish sorting the laundry yesterday, but somehow, amid the soft clutter of Saturday afternoon, I hadn’t. There would be time today.

Or perhaps there wouldn’t.

Some domestic battles simply weren’t worth fighting twice in a row—particularly when the only consequence was a visual offence to my personal standards of harmony.

I wrapped my fingers more securely around my mug, letting its ceramic warmth seep deeper into my palms, chasing away the small chill that had settled in my joints. The heat worked its way inward with a slow, determined kindness, addressing a quiet ache lodged just behind my breastbone—not quite physical discomfort, not quite emotional weight, but something that lived in that liminal space between body and spirit, where certain kinds of longing made themselves known.

How many years had I sat exactly like this? Mug cradled in careful hands, wool blanket draped across my knees, ears attuned to the subtle signs of life stirring through the house.

Once, these moments of stillness had been mythic in their rarity—precious and unexpected, like birdsong in the heart of winter. Sweet, improbable, and fleeting.

When the children were little, mornings had begun not with soft light but in the dense, absolute dark of pre-dawn, accompanied by the kind of urgency only small children could summon. Someone always needed toast—cut precisely, buttered to the edge. Someone had always misplaced a shoe, often in a location that defied both logic and physics. And someone else would be halfway to tears over a missing spoon, as if its absence rendered all other utensils offensively unfit for purpose.

Those years had passed like a kind of beautiful siege. All motion. All clamour. Milk-slicked floors and sticky hands reaching for things they shouldn’t. Bedtime negotiations waged with the complexity of international diplomacy.

Every surface bore the imprint of their growing lives: fingerprints on doorframes, toys beneath foot, crayons in places crayons should never have been. The soundtrack of those years was a symphony of questions, demands, and the strange, inimitable chaos of small people learning to navigate an adult-sized world.

I missed them.

The truth of it rose in my chest with unexpected sharpness, cutting through the stillness like a breath caught too quickly. A longing so fierce and sudden it startled me. I missed those chaotic mornings with a depth I rarely allowed myself to acknowledge—let alone examine—in full.

But I wouldn’t go back. Not exactly. Not with the bone-deep weariness that had settled in my limbs during those years of unrelenting vigilance. Not with the tangled mess of unfinished thoughts that crowded my mind like unruly birds, each chirping their own list of unmet needs.

Not with the exhaustion that came from never quite finishing anything—because someone always needed something else. Right now. In just the right way.

This moment—this stretch of quiet, uninterrupted and generous—was the reward. The stillness earned after decades of shepherding. Of guiding young lives through scraped knees, lost tempers, night terrors, and triumphs so small they might go unnoticed by anyone else.

And yet, even now, even here in this hush I had longed for so often, my heart still held the exact shape of those noisy, tangled mornings.

Their echo folded itself gently into the silence. Not an interruption, but a thread woven through the peace. The chaos hadn’t vanished. It had only changed form.

It lived now in memory, softened by affection. No longer a storm, but a presence I could carry without being undone by its weight.

Not gone. Just transformed.

Noah shifted slightly beside me, the movement barely perceptible in the larger scheme of things, yet registering with perfect clarity in the private geography of my awareness.

His knee nudged gently against mine through the soft wool of our respective pyjamas—a brief contact that might have seemed accidental to anyone else, but carried the quiet weight of intention. The kind that builds over years of shared space and the slow, faithful accumulation of intimacy.

I leant into the touch without thinking, my body responding to his presence with the ease that only long marriages could foster. A small gesture. Unremarkable, instinctive. Yet it belonged to that category of wordless communication that required no effort and no interpretation.

It was a language of proximity. Of knowing each other’s outlines, each other’s silences.

“Thanks for this,” he said quietly, his voice low, almost reverent—as though careful not to disturb the cathedral hush that had settled around us. He nodded toward his mug with the understated grace of someone acknowledging a kindness that might appear minor from the outside, but which held real meaning between us.

We stayed like that for a while longer, neither of us feeling any urgency to move, or speak, or disturb the delicate equilibrium we had achieved.

The hush of the morning held around us like a held breath—not brittle with tension or straining under the threat of interruption, but resting in its own completeness. Expansive. Still. As though even the house, in all its creaks and hums, had recognised this moment for what it was and had chosen to lend its silence as a gesture of solidarity.

Outside, the morning light continued its slow unfurling, strengthening beyond the windows with increasingly confident strokes of gold and amber.

Somewhere in the distance, life began to stir. A car door clicked shut, soft and distant. The low thrum of someone beginning their Sunday run. The faint rustle of wind starting to move through the pepper trees lining the street.

And for once—perhaps for the first time in longer than I cared to admit—there was no television issuing its shrill summons from the lounge.

No mechanical laughter. No dramatic explosions battling for attention. No thunder of footsteps as someone dashed from bedroom to bathroom, waging war with mirrors and hair products in search of the right version of themselves for the day. No spirited debate over who had rightful claim to the last pancake, or which tie might appear more spiritually persuasive come Sacrament meeting.

Just the two of us.

Settled into our familiar positions on the couch like two puzzle pieces finally placed where they were always meant to go. Millie snored softly from her spot by the door, her dreams apparently having reached some gentler phase of pursuit or play.

The faint tang of cocoa still lingered in the air, curling around us like a benediction—quiet, persistent, and warm with the kind of comfort only simple things can bring when given the grace of attention.

And threading through it all, delicate but unmistakeable, was a sense—fragile, yes, but real—that somewhere along the long and complicated road of building this life together, we had managed to get something right.

Not everything. Not always. And certainly not without our share of wrong turns and frayed tempers.

The evidence of our missteps was ever-present: the unfinished projects spilling from the garage, the stubborn tangles of certain family relationships, the thousands of moments where we’d chosen expedience over patience, routine over connection, survival over the ideal of love we had once so fervently hoped to model.

But still—somehow, despite it all—we had done enough.

Enough to sit here now in this earned quiet. Enough to recognise this stillness for what it was: a kind of proof. A gentle assurance that the home we had built, for all its imperfections and inconsistencies, held something worth preserving.