A Worthy Cause on a Monday Morning
It is Monday morning.
My ears are full of the sounds of coffee brewing and the Octonauts English accents and cars whizzing by and kids on my front lawn walking to school.
My list today is long, but full of my favorite errands. The meal planning, the preparing, the chopping and bagging and roasting for the weeknights I will be working. Monday is also library day. Ellie and I have been inhaling books like a vacuum- indiscriminately. Closing our eyes and pointing to the shelves and taking home where our fingers land. It has been a full, expansive exercise. But Bread and Jam for Francis still ends up in the basket, of course.
There are business type things to tie up- accountant calls and LLC papers to finalize and tuition to be paid. Schedules to be shuffled and accommodations to be made.
It is a stark contrast from our weekend in the mountains where the only sounds were water trickling, birds swooping and the occasional coyote dancing through the woods. We split our time between the tiny cottage in the woods where we were sleeping, and a sweeping, working farm where we celebrated a marriage, and a mission for people of all ilk to know and believe that they are capable of making something meaningful and beautiful. Ellie was enamored by a little calf named Scarlet who seemed to wag her tail like a puppy in excitement to see us. She loved feeding the goats pine branches, watching their little lips curl up and over the greenery. We ate meals together, sharing what was grown and made right there on the farm- Ellie found a friend who was a great play partner and they climbed and ran and chattered like girls do. After shuffling through the last few months in a congested stupor, it was what we all needed to breathe.
And so, here we are. Back where it's harder to see the stars at night and our senses are once again filled with the buzz of the tri-state area. It is familiar. It is home. And yet, something in our daughter stirred this weekend- something alive and bright and full of hope as she dashed through wide open spaces and up and over rocks and squealed with delight at baby piglets just born. She asked if we could stay- stay where there was not so much noise and much more to do, outside where she belongs. Can she be where she can learn how to ride horses and throw rocks in streams and sing to the birds?
We are here, I explain. Here is our home where God has planted our roots- each of them a name, and a face we love. But we can put the list aside today and turn off all of the noise and plan out our garden on the living room floor. And you can get dirty and dig and turn the thawed winter earth over and we can pick out what we will grow in our tiny, urban yard. There are horses and piglets and chickens here, too, we just have to look. We can keep what is important to us here, it just takes a little extra work, a little extra determination, a little extra imagination. Good thing you're good at all of those.
So, I'm being extra gentle with her today, not wanting to break the magic that God breathed on her- that his creation is beautiful and important and we are stewards of it. That his people are beautiful and important and we are stewards of them. That she, in fact, is beautiful and important and a contributing member of this community- at four. And I suppose we'll keep seeking to marry the in between- the balance of the life we were born into and the one that seems to be calling. It's a worthy cause.