Ps. 119:33-40
THURSDAY
My dear sister-in-law offered to bring us dinner tonight out of the blue. What a blessing! I used the extra time to catch up on overdue chores. I washed some windows (yes, in February), cleaned out my toaster oven, and vacuumed and dusted the living room. I folded clean diapers, entered receipts into my budget spreadsheet, organized the books on each bookshelf by color, and did a load of laundry. When one task (making dinner) is lifted, a whole armload of extra time and energy is suddenly available for other things.
I read somewhere that you don't need extra time in your life for the things you wish you could do. You just need to put down your iphone and you'll probably find that you have the time you thought you lacked. I like to think I don't get wrapped up in social media - or anything else frivolous - so much that it precludes doing other things in a given day. But if I'm honest, many of my minutes each day are misspent. In the course of composing this paragraph, I stopped to order books, look up baked oatmeal recipes, stalk old college friends, change my Pandora station, and read a blog post about yoga pants. And those are just my internet distractions. I seem incapable of shutting down the dozens of newsfeeds running in my head at once.
My one year old has a short attention span, but when he's doing something, he can be pretty intent. I love watching him play, dumping blocks out of the bin, then putting them all back in. Or pulling each book from the shelf one at a time. After 27 years I've lost the skill of doing just one thing. I'm aiming to get that back.
FRIDAY
I needed milk today, so Henry and I went to pick some up.
Here:
It's one of my top five favorite places on the planet. The smell, the smallness, the homeyness, the twisty-tied bags of cereal on shelves, local produce, fresh ground coffee, and the best chocolate milk you've ever tasted in your life. It's just a mile or so from our first apartment, which is about 25 minutes from where we live now. A bit of a drive for milk, you might think, but it's worth every mile.
I feel like I fit there, like it waits for me. It doesn't, of course. The Farm Store wouldn't know if I moved to Alaska and never came back. But like any place where you once belonged, any place that once felt like home, it draws me.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing. That ache for a place, the way the heart puts down anchors all over the globe. It's not just the Farm Store itself that I love. It's the narrow roads that take me there, the cemetery on the corner, the old farmhouses, the post office, every tree and creek and bridge, all reminding me of that chapter of life when these were part of my daily landscape.
Too much nostalgia for a place from the past is unwise. But an occasional drive out to Kolb's for a few gallons of farm fresh milk seems a healthy way to satisfy the ache. And a 45-cent half pint of chocolate milk to drink on the way home is a nice consolation prize to make up for moving away.
I thought a lot about my five favorite places. The other four winners are:
- 426 Chatam Dr, Cape May NJ
- Flanders Hotel, Ocean City NJ
- 8 Crick Road, Oxford England
- Teach's Lair Marina, Cape Hatteras NC
- Honorable Mention: the walking trail outside Holley Ross Pottery, Cresco PA
SATURDAY
Why does it seem like my days revolve around food? As I try to map out how my day has gone, nearly every item is food-related. Breakfast with P and H, devotions with coffee, meal-planning, preparing H's lunch, grocery shopping, leftovers for my own lunch, dinner prep, cooking sweet potato hashbrowns to try this week. I do love a good afternoon in the kitchen, and today was extra relaxing after Mom and Dad took Henry for the afternoon. He got a visit with Nannie and Pops (and MomMom and PopPop!) and I got some uninterrupted cooking time. As far as doing one thing at a time goes, this was a successful afternoon.
Now, as night blues the sky outside and Pete works upstairs with his brother and dad on our new bathroom, I'm sipping lemon water and looking forward to sharing some Homestyle Potato Soup with Jon and Kim before we binge on a few episodes of Downton Abbey.
Saturday is bliss.
Grateful this week for:
two hour delay
coffee
blue jeans
pink sunrise
toddler toys
H's tower of blocks
Little Blue Truck book
jamberry nail wraps
hot tea
H's long afternoon nap
houseplant
Advil
Admin Team
lemon salt scrub
hot crusty bread
nieces
the built-in seats for kids in shopping carts
the search for joy
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