Contentment

Warnie has been home since before Christmas and is now retired... He has become a permanent member of our household and I hope we shall pass the rest of our lives together. He has settled down as easily as a man settles into a chair, and what between his reading and working in the garden finds himself busy from morning till night. He and I are making a path through the lower wood -- first along the shore of the pond and then turning away from it up through the birch trees and rejoining at the top the ordinary track up the hill. It is very odd and delightful to be engaged on this sort of thing together: the last time we tried to make a path together was in the field at Little Lea when he was at Malvern and I was at Cherbourg. We both have a feeling that ‘the wheel has come full circuit’, that the period of wanderings is over, and that everything which has happened between 1914 and 1932 was an interruption: tho' not without a consciousness that it is dangerous for mere mortals to expect anything of the future with confidence. We make a very contented family together.

C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume II,
Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 4, 1933)

[As you can see from the photo -- taken 3 years ago -- the pond is now in a disgraceful, and pretty stagnant, state, and Jack and Warnie’s “path through the lower wood” is now badly overgrown.]