The Candle, the Soup, the Walk

Winter does not arrive with a calendar date. It enters slowly, like a shadow lengthening across the room. First, the evenings slip away earlier than I notice. Then the sound of the world changes: footsteps on the pavement sharpen, voices outside seem to fall back into echoes. And then there is the stillness — an almost imperceptible pause that settles over the air. That is when I know it has come. Winter begins not in snow or frost, but in the silence that draws me inward.

It is this silence that has taught me the language of ritual. My family did not practice elaborate winter traditions. We were not a household of official ceremonies, no formal prayers around the table, no grand feasts that gathered distant cousins in their finery. What we had instead were gestures — small, unremarkable habits repeated often enough that they embedded themselves into the rhythm of our lives. For years, I never thought of them as rituals. They were simply the things we did to get through the dark months. Only later, once absence hollowed out the house, did I realize that these gestures were my inheritance.

Three of them, in particular, return to me each year: the candle, the soup, the walk. Simple things, yet stubborn in their insistence. They hold me in place when the days shorten and the air sharpens. They are my winter, my quiet liturgy.

The Candle

My grandmother’s candle always came first.

She did not explain it, not in words I could hold onto. She would light it in the late afternoon, long before night fell completely, and place it on the windowsill of her kitchen. It was never a special candle — no ornate colors, no carved symbols, nothing imported or ceremonial. Usually it was the sort of candle you could buy in bulk at the grocery store, white or ivory, set into a simple glass holder. Yet when she struck the match, her entire body softened.

"The night is long," she would say, "and light should be longer." That was the closest she came to an explanation.

As a child, I found myself hypnotized by that flicker. The way the flame shivered in the draft, the way it leaned toward the glass as though trying to escape into the street. I imagined people walking past, catching sight of it through the window, and feeling less alone. My grandmother never said so, but perhaps that was part of it: the candle was both for us and for strangers, a small declaration that warmth still lived here, even if unseen.

Now, in my own home, I repeat the gesture. At dusk I strike the match, watch the sulfur bloom, and set the candle in place. The light trembles exactly as it did then. And each time, I feel her presence — quiet, patient, a reminder that resistance does not always roar. Sometimes it is enough simply to shine against the dark.

There are evenings when I almost forget. When the weight of work or distraction presses too heavily, I move through the room without looking toward the window. But then a shadow lengthens, and I catch myself. The ritual insists. It is not obligation but gravity. My hand reaches for the matchbox before I can argue.

Over the years I have tried different candles — tall ones, scented ones, elegant beeswax tapers that drip wax in graceful spirals. But none of them hold the same power as the plain white ones, the ones that look almost forgettable. Their very ordinariness matters. Because what is winter if not the art of finding the extraordinary in the smallest flame?

The Soup

If the candle belongs to my grandmother, the soup belongs to my father.

It was a crude recipe, if it can even be called a recipe at all. He would take garlic — always too much, whole heads sometimes — and crush the cloves with the flat of a knife. Into the pot they went, along with whatever stock or water he had, a handful of vegetables if they lingered in the fridge, salt, pepper, maybe a dash of oil. The proportions never mattered to him. What mattered was the heat, the way the kitchen filled with the pungent, unmistakable smell of garlic as it softened and melted into the broth.

As children, we groaned about it. The scent clung to our clothes, our hair, our skin. Friends at school wrinkled their noses. But my father would shrug and ladle it out. "It keeps the colds away," he said, though we suspected he liked it less for its supposed medicinal value and more for the way it seemed to push back the winter from inside out.

After he was gone, I found myself craving it — not refined soups, not delicately seasoned bisques, but that exact reckless garlic brew. Each winter I attempt it, never quite the same, but always close enough. I peel the cloves one by one, letting their papery skins fall like snow across the counter. I crush them, toss them into the pot, watch the oil shimmer as the room fills with that sharp perfume of memory.

Eating it now, I taste more than garlic. I taste his stubbornness, his certainty that something so simple could be armor. I taste the years of his life folded into those bowls, the way he returned to the pot each winter as though it were a compass pointing him toward survival.

Soup, like ritual, is not about perfection. It is about repetition, about insistence. About saying: this is how we get through. This is how we stay.

The Walk

The final gesture belongs to my mother: the winter walk.

She was relentless about it. Snow falling, wind cutting, temperatures that stiffened our breath into crystals — none of it deterred her. "Even snow belongs to the lungs," she would say, tugging us into boots, fastening scarves under our chins. We whined, we resisted, but she always managed to herd us out the door.

At the time I hated it. My socks grew damp, my toes numb, my cheeks burned raw from the wind. Yet something in those walks etched itself into me. The crunch of boots on snow. The muffled quiet that fell over the neighborhood once draped in white. The way lamplight seemed to swell in halos, glowing against the darkness as though the air itself were enchanted.

Now, each winter, I take my own walks. Not daily, not with the rigor she demanded, but often enough that the ritual remains. I step outside into the cold evening, my breath rising like smoke. The world is transformed: branches skeletal against the sky, streets hushed, the occasional dog bark echoing sharp and brief. The solitude is not loneliness but communion. To walk in winter is to surrender to the fact that the world is not built for our comfort. It is built for cycles, for seasons, for rest.

I walk to remember that I, too, am temporary. That my own seasons will pass, and that this is not tragedy but truth. The walk restores perspective. It strips away the noise of my own restlessness and returns me to the simple fact of being alive, breathing, moving through a landscape that asks nothing of me but attention.

Inheritance of Silence

Together, the candle, the soup, and the walk form the ritual I never consciously invented. It was given to me piecemeal, through three people who are no longer here to explain themselves. None of them would have called these acts rituals. Yet repetition has a way of transforming gesture into ceremony.

I sometimes wonder if they realized what they were handing me. Did my grandmother know her candle would burn in my window decades later? Did my father imagine his garlic soup would become the taste of longing? Did my mother understand that every time I step into the cold night, I am walking beside her shadow?

Perhaps not. Ritual is rarely deliberate at first. It begins as necessity, as habit, as the simplest answer to the question: How do we survive this season? Over time, the answer accumulates meaning. Survival becomes memory. Memory becomes inheritance.

Winter itself seems to demand this. The season pares everything down. Trees stripped to bare bones. Days clipped short. Air sharpened until each breath cuts. In such a landscape, only essentials remain: light, warmth, movement. My family taught me to honor them. And now I honor them still.

The Years That Break the Ritual

There have been winters when the rituals faltered.

The year after my father died, I could not bear the soup. The smell of garlic was too much, too loud, too insistent in its reminder. I left the cloves unpeeled in their basket until they shriveled, unable to crush them without crushing myself. That winter, I survived on bread and tea.

Another year, when grief pressed too heavily, I forgot the candle entirely. Days slipped into nights without light. The window remained dark. Neighbors may have passed by and wondered if the house was empty. In many ways, it was.

And there are winters even now when the walk feels impossible. Depression presses me into the chair, convinces me that cold air is too sharp, that streets are too empty, that nothing waits outside. Those nights, the ritual seems lost.

Yet even then, it returns. Not because I force it, but because it forces me. Garlic calls from the market shelf. A box of matches appears in the drawer. The first snow falls, and my body remembers the rhythm of boots on frozen ground. Rituals, once learned, refuse to vanish. They wait for the moment when I am ready to follow them again.

The Prayer of Repetition

What I have learned is this: rituals do not change the world. They do not cure grief, erase loneliness, or banish despair. But they shape the dark. They give it a frame, a border, a rhythm. And in that shape, I find something like belonging.

The candle does not drive away the night, but it declares that night cannot have everything.

The soup does not fill every hunger, but it insists that warmth can still enter the body.

The walk does not solve my restlessness, but it teaches me that restlessness is part of living.

Perhaps that is the secret of winter. It does not ask us to conquer it, only to persist. To light one flame, to cook one pot, to take one step. To repeat, again and again, until repetition itself becomes prayer.

My Winter

This is my ritual of winter: three gestures, ordinary and unremarkable, braided into a liturgy of survival. It belongs to me, yet it does not. It belongs to the people who gave it to me, to the silence that holds it, to the season that demands it.

Each year, as the nights grow long, I return to it. And each year, it returns to me.

The candle.

The soup.

The walk.

Light.

Warmth.

Breath.

That is enough.