Every year since their wedding, Alex and Mae had the same tradition. They would wait for the first genuine frost of the season, when the world turned silver-white overnight. One would wake the other before dawn, and together they would prepare their special spiced tea while the world still slept.
This morning, Mae's phone had chimed at 4 AM with her weather alert: First frost warning. She smiled in the darkness, watching Daniel's peaceful breathing for a moment before gently shaking his shoulder.
“It's time,” she whispered.
Their kitchen was dark except for the gentle blue light filtering through frosted windows. They moved in harmony, Alex grinding the special blend of spices while Mae heated the water to exactly the right temperature. Cinnamon, star anise, cardamom, and their secret ingredient: one tiny dried rosebud, saved from their wedding bouquet.
“Fifteen years of first frosts,” Alex murmured, measuring the spices carefully. They had started this tradition on their honeymoon in a tiny cottage in Vermont, when they'd improvised a spiced tea from what they could find in the rental kitchen's cupboards.
Each year, they'd refined the recipe, adding new elements that marked the passages of their life together. Cardamom from their trip to India on their fifth anniversary. Star anise from the Chinese market that opened the year they bought their house. A touch of local honey from the year they started keeping bees in their backyard.
Mae wrapped her hands around her mug, watching the steam rise in delicate spirals. Outside, the world was silent except for the occasional crack of freezing branches. This was their moment, suspended between night and day, summer and winter, just the two of them and their ritual.
“Remember our first frost in the apartment?” Alex asked, smiling. “When we had to huddle by that tiny radiator?”
“And the year we got snowed in at the cabin,” Mae added, “and had to melt frost from the windows to make our tea.”
Each first frost was a marker in their shared history, like rings in a tree trunk. The bitter year after Mae's mother passed, when the tea tasted of salt from their tears. The joyful morning they'd added a tiny cup for their daughter, though she'd only been able to smell it from her baby carrier.
Today's frost felt different. Mae had known it would. She pulled an envelope from her robe pocket just as Alex reached into his, and they both laughed, fifteen years, and still so in sync.
“You first,” Alex said softly.
Mae's hands trembled slightly as she opened her envelope. “I got the job in Seattle,” she whispered. “The research position I've dreamed about.”
Alex's smile grew wider as he opened his envelope. “And I got the transfer approved to the Seattle office.”
The steam from their tea mingled in the pre-dawn light, dancing together like their shared dreams finally aligning. They had spent months worried about this moment, about potential choices between careers and their life together. But somehow, like their perfect tea blend, everything had fallen into place.
“Next year's first frost will be in a different kitchen,” Mae said, watching the star anise slowly spin in her cup.
“With new spices to discover,” Alex added. “I hear Seattle has amazing tea shops.”
As the sun began to rise, painting their frosted garden in shades of gold and pink, they sat in comfortable silence, sipping their tea. The recipe would travel with them, carefully written in Mae's grandmother's recipe book, along with fifteen years of margin notes about each first frost.
Before they left for work, they would take their traditional first frost photo, their steaming cups against the icy windows, the rising sun creating halos in the frost. And next year, in a new kitchen with a different view, they would add another spice, another memory, another year of choosing each other with every cup of tea.
Because some traditions, they had learned, weren't about the place or even the perfect blend of spices. They were about the moments shared between two people who had grown together like vines, stronger for every season weathered, sweeter for every frost survived.
As they finished their tea, Alex reached for Mae's hand, their wedding rings clinking softly against their empty cups. “To our next first frost,” he said.
“And all the ones after that,” Mae replied, knowing that wherever life took them, they would always have this – their perfect moment in the blue light of dawn, sharing warmth against the frost, one carefully spiced cup at a time.