Small Acts of Kindness

I woke up the day before Christmas, ready to move myself from one room to the other, bedroom to office. My jaw dropped when I saw the gorgeous snow-covered backyard and soft snowflakes gently touching the window before they landed on the ground. Even though I was sure my friend wouldn’t be awake yet, I decided to text her anyway “It’s snowing, I’m awake, let’s go for a walk!” Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. I gave her a big grin and quickly got dressed into my warmest outfit, grabbing a big scarf and a pair of soft gloves to cover my already nearly frozen hands. Together we walked to the moor that was only a five minute walk away, carefully watching every step we took so we wouldn’t go flat on our faces due to the ice on the streets and the slippery snowflakes that were still falling.

“There is a new coffee place just around the corner, hidden away on one of the greens that is surrounded by hedges, we should go and get a coffee!” We waddled through the park, turned right and were welcomed by the warm and soothing smell of freshly ground coffee. A few people were sitting on benches on the green, two dogs playing and barking at the birds that were teasing them while fluttering in the winter sun. There was a small building with a kitchen, next to it a cosy yet improvised take away station with a barista that seemed to not have any heating anywhere near. We ordered two coffees from him, but he wouldn’t look us in the eyes, nor give us a smile. When he gave us our coffees and wanted to turn around to clean the coffee machine I said loudly “Have a nice day!” and I think he mumbled back “You too…” but it could have been anything. We decided to let it be and walked further into the park, ready to make some snow angels and possibly even a snowman.

We just couldn’t help ourselves while we were building our snow family and started singing some songs from the musical Frozen. Within five minutes we were surrounded by children, their parents and their dogs who all started helping to build our snow town. After less than twenty minutes most of the hands that had been building our snow family were frozen, so we decided to go back to the take away station for another hot beverage. One of the families followed our lead and both their son and daughter chatted our ears off our heads. We decided to buy them both a hot chocolate, and their parents a coffee, which they thanked us greatly for. It turned out that they had fallen victim to the pandemic and both parents had lost their job, building show families was a great and free way to entertain themselves, but a warm drink was definitely more than welcome afterwards!

The barista at the coffee stand saw us coming from afar and before he quickly turned around I spotted a cheeky little smile! A poked my friend and said “Did you see that? He smiled!” we ordered our drinks just before we could walk out of hearing distance, the barista said, slightly mockingly “Have a nice day!” We used my big scarf as a pillow so we wouldn’t freeze to one of the benches on the open green next to the coffee stand and for a while we talked to the kids and their parents. After nearly half an hour the kids got too cold and wanted to go back home, their parents smiled at us and said “You have no idea how much a warm beverage and a brief chat can do to a human! For a while there, I forgot about all of our worries, thank you.”