Gems of the Season

Clementines, bright orange balls of goodness that burst in your mouth are the flavour of November. I have seen three seasons come and go in our small town of Lupeni and you can mark the passing of time by the ripe produce in our fruits and vegetables store. This summer I ate nectarines and tomatoes by the bushel, the best I have ever tasted. I devoured them beyond my heart’s content just to savour the freshness that local food brings, untainted, and uncompromised by chemical fertilizers. Good food brings life and colour to your world, and I feel that here now more than ever. Thank you God for colourful fruit! As seasons end new changes arrive as when the girls came to join me here in Lupeni at the end of the summer. Together we made a transition into a new chapter. We were to live amongst each other every day and our social circle changed from a campus of friends to nine girls.  It was a leap, but one into a safe place. I am so thankful for these girls, everyone has their own colour and brings a different flavour of personality, and we collaborate to make one heck of a healthy salad. We 9 ladies have formed a fellowship, and have embarked on many adventures, scaling mountain heights and trudging through deep valleys. 

The great blessings on our journey have been the gems we’ve stumbled upon. Transylvania is a region of nooks and crannies and you never know what’s hidden around the next bend till you’ve made the turn. One of the latest gems we came across was while driving through Maramures, prided as the heart of Transylvania and famous for its wooden churches. We bumped our way down a long canopied lane and turned into sight of one of the largest wooden churches in Europe, tucked safely away in a quiet little wood. This safe haven of beauty and reverence was the place to be for us. Now being in late fall a faint chill has set into the air and as my breath clouded around me I gaped at the tranquil splendour we’d been blessed by. So many emotions have filled this semester of adventure, but these gems that we stumble across bring something special to our time that we want to go on drinking in. We left that space revived, and sang ‘simple gifts’ in rounds all the way back to our hotel.

Fall is the season of the harvest, the season of plenty and thanksgiving and the fruit to buy in our little store at that time were the grapes. Grapes come in bunches, as our fall blessings were given, in bunches. One of our safest places as a group is around a table, where we celebrate our time together with the foods of the seasons. We are upon the changing of seasons again, facing the beginning of winter, in light of which we have begun a new tradition: Friday Night Soup and Sum’n Sum’n. We fight off the cold from sinking into the bones with hot soup and a little something extra. Last night’s specialty was Chilli and cornbread enjoyed over a viewing of one of the greatest adventures: The Fellowship of the Ring, my all time favourite. As seasons come and go you remember the gems of your adventures. I held my bowl of chilli real close last night, feeling how it warmed my hands and the aroma my heart. I know that these days are the gems that will warm my soul in the times to come post-Romania Semester. . .