Yesterday my house smelled like apple cinnamon cake — the old recipe that I remember being very good before misplacing it and making do with the new recipe that isn’t quite as good, until I found the old recipe again. I thought it best to bake a test cake to make sure the old recipe was as good as I remembered it. It is. Need to make the real cake tomorrow morning, since I brought the test cake to temple today to share with everybody working like mad to prep everything for services starting Friday night and carrying on through the weekend.

Today my house smells like gefilte fish, citrus honey brine for the soon-to-be roasted turkey breast, and soup broth for the matzo ball soup. Savory and cozy but a little less pleasant a mix of odors than the ones that the cake brought to my nostrils yesterday.

Oh — did I mention it’s almost Rosh Hashanah?

The holiday begins this Friday evening, and my husband, daughter, and I will be cooking a delicious feast for…just the three of us, as my in-laws are away spending it with the Texas contingent of our family. It’ll be a cozy and quiet evening, and we’re attending services the following morning, which will be pretty much the opposite of cozy and quiet. Feels like a nice balance, and, I have to admit, it’s hard to get used to having cozy and quiet holidays after growing up with every holiday being inevitably full of screaming maniacs. But I digress.

Rosh Hashanah being the Jewish new year, it initiates what we call the Days of Awe — those are the nine or ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and in spiritual terms, it’s the time that’s marked by fates being written in the Book of Life, and sealed accordingly. I always get this sense that during the Days of Awe, we exist in a sort of liminal space. Decisions become more important during this time. Seeking a more balanced perspective on life and the world in which I’m living it feels particularly impactful. I’ll admit that the “regular” New Year’s Eve can have a similar effect, but a week and a half of such self-reflection is a heck of a lot more processing time.

I’ll also admit that it so happens I’ve had a heck of a lot more processing time in general lately. This past Tuesday was the first day of school for my daughter…but not for me. I’ve been spending the last two and a half months searching for new work and processing this major development. Liminal space, indeed.

New beginnings are ahead. The Days of Awe are as good a time as any to pause and listen, watch and wait. After all, to quote Christine Caine (who according to an internet search seems like a decent person — I checked because I love this quote and want to attribute it accordingly as well as not quote icky people if I can help it), “Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but you’ve actually been planted.” So, maybe I’m in that liminal space underground, just waiting for the right time and place to sprout and find the sun again.

The only thing I know for sure is that I hope we all — and I do mean we all, as in, the whole world — can have a sweeter year than the one we’re leaving behind us. It’s been real tough, but, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Here’s another quote from a source I can vouch for with certainty — as Bilbo Baggins once said, “Where there’s life, there’s hope!”

Shana Tova, everyone.