Wrestling with my moods & seeking peace

Good morning, DMV! It’s Wednesday, March 4.

I’m wrestling with my moods. The world is at war. The weather shifted from sunny warmth to snow to rain. I missed the lunar eclipse. Actually, I decided to sleep through it because the skies weren’t cooperating. And my life is in flux.

So I nudge myself toward my tried-and-true remedies.

I look at the impossible too-blue puzzle on my coffee table and find one more piece that fits. That’s the only piece added since I wrote about it and photographed it last week. I call it a day with that. A win!

I try to find peace in the kitchen, dice a big bowl of veggies and make a Thai-vibe chili I’ve been testing. Veggies, beans and massaman curry paste — fish sauce and lime to boost the flavor. Then I snip leaves from the kaffir lime plant my mom gave me. I wash them and make a tidy stack of leaves, then slice them into tiny slivers — inhaling deeply as their perfume fills the air. I sprinkle the leaf slivers into the pot. Yum.

After dinner, I turn to my knitting. The rhythm of my needles clicking against each other, moving stitches back and forth, slows my meandering monkey mind. But as I write these words, the monkey skips about … back to my kaffir lime plant.

She looked sick. I stop writing this to inspect the plant, and I find some sort of infestation. So I clean her leaves and branches by hand — her feisty thorns pricking me now and then. She looks so vulnerable in a small pot. I think of the kaffir lime that grew next to my house in Bangkok — a mid-size tree that bore lumpy green fruits.

I return to knitting, listening to the rain and Billie, Ella and Louis to calm me.

D.C. resident Kathy Hessler, 62, took this photo on Feb. 16 during a morning walk.

“Rain water had pooled on top of the ice on the Potomac causing a unique reflection. The grays and muted blues can be depressing, but this felt calming,” Kathy wrote in her submission.