A Road Less Travelled

Today’s haiku–

Just me
and my thoughts–
too crowded

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When I was in Erie I noticed the stairs in Josh and Adiel’s house. Specifically, I noticed the wall beside the stairs, and the verses of hymns Adiel had painted there. Two thoughts jumped to mind when I saw this. One was that this was a really cool idea and I should store this away for future reference. The other was that someday Lily or Malachi would have to paint over it, and that would be hard for them, and it would hurt.

This got me pondering why we do things, and this recent post of Adiel’s reminded me of the whole train of thought. I don’t happen to be able to paint or draw much, so I will put this first in terms of writing.

Who am I writing for? I am very tempted to think that I am writing for a broad audience, and that people will read my books for many years after I die. (You know, all those books I’m actually going to write someday.)

So here’s the next question: why do I care? Why do I care what people a hundred years from now think of what I write? Why does it seem more important to have them read my books (being timeless and lasting literature and all that) than to have the people that I spend my entire life around reading and enjoying my books? I could write up a manuscript and pass it around a couple of families that I happen to know well enough to predict what they would like–but that wouldn’t be a real book. Would it? Why exactly is it better have complete strangers liking what I write?

Or what if I wrote a poem that only made sense for one person on one particular occasion? It feels like a lot of effort for something that only matters for a few seconds. No one else would ever want to read the poem, or really understand it if they did read it. Then it occured to me that one poem could be brought up a lot of times in Heaven. So maybe only one person would ever care about this one poem, but if I were to do it well, it would be a memory we shared for eternity.

I put a lot of effort into things that don’t seem to last. I cook supper one night; someone will have to cook supper again the next night. Theresa sews dresses that the girls will quickly grow out of. The laundry gets dirtied and the dishwasher gets refilled with dirty dishes.

I write letters that are likely only read once. I make the children laugh with a joke that can never be repeated and still be funny.

So if I pour all of my talent into one house, and let the overflow spill into the community around me, if I make beautiful walls and floors and fill the rooms with stories woven around inside jokes and with poems I instantly forget, that’s okay with me. If the blankets I crochet are stained with coffee and ripped on nails it doesn’t really matter–they’re being used.

I still would like a write books that will actually be published. I’m even willing to let people in on the inside jokes so they get the stories. But if I don’t quite get around to it because I’m too busy with the people right in front of me, well then, people a hundred years from now are just going to have to fend for themselves. I’m not planning to waste too much of my effort on them.

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Another haiku dredged from the dark recesses of my old notebook– 

 

If I must be young
let it be
gracefully 

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The haiku of the day is back by popular acclaim! Well, some people missed it… Well, at least one person missed it…

 

Saturday morning
almost awake
rain on the roof

 

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Every now and then I look at our category labels and I chuckle. Well, sometimes I might chortle about them, but usually I chuckle. And if the category label is “Life, Children and Dishes” I might bust out with a full-blown snicker. It’s funny. And it is especially funny if the blog post you, or rather I, are, or rather am, labeling is predominantly taken up with life, children or dishes. See, it’s funny.

Okay, maybe you don’t think it’s as funny as I am making it out to be so I’ll switch topics and talk about life. Life is proceeding at a goodly pace. Last week I kept misplacing at least one hour every day and then I would find that I had merely left it at the most recent project. I have yet to lose any hours this week, but it’s only Tuesday morning so there’s time yet. Yesterday I started the actual moving process and took a load of stuff over to Kathey’s garage. We and she will be sharing an alley and she’ll about eight houses down from us so we are piling our stuff in her garage so we won’t trip over it here. Already the house feels slightly calmer now that a vanful of stuff is no longer here.

Have I mentioned yet that I have never moved like this before? I’ve moved myself across the country, but that was just me and it was a weird situation to begin with. I came with Seth and Crystal when they moved here, but I wasn’t really moving and I don’t think I was really that much help. So now we’re moving and I get to experience it from beginning to end. So, I’m looking down the line a bit and I think I will not enjoy these next few weeks very much. We are going to be packing, but not moving yet so there is stuff we won’t have. And the stuff we won’t have will either have to be stacked in space we then won’t have or carted over to Kathey’s garage. And while we pack there is work we are going to be doing on this house so I have a houseful of work staring me in the face and I don’t like the ugly look in its eye.

And yet I’m still feeling excited. For starters, I’ve never done this before. Moving seems to be something everyone has done before, but I never have. This is my chance to join the club, to give in to peer pressure. Isn’t that exciting?! For seconds, I am really looking forward to living in the new house. The kitchen sink is not in a major walkway, most of the doorways downstairs are arches, three bathrooms, a breakfast bar with pass-through and a dishwasher. And the Lansberrys right down the street. What more could this aunt want? For thirdly, Crystal is letting me throw stuff away she would never have let me before. I am having so much fun. I’ll go running up to her with the last glass/plate/bowl of its kind and say, “Do we want this?” She’ll look and think and then she’ll say, “Not really” and away it goes to the Getting-Rid-Of box. Hooray!!

So, I think what I’m saying is ‘Life is about normal around here. Hope yours is the same.’ Hmm, it’s more succinct, but not as much fun. I think I’ll stick to my babbling.

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 When I got up this morning I had no intention of driving to Goodfield. To be honest, I never really intended to drive to Goodfield, but when I got up this morning I didn’t even intend to drive to Morton which is where I was actually planning to go when I got in the car this morning about fifteen minutes after I knew I was going anywhere.

  See, James went to Chicago today. He went to Chicago with a friend so that said friend could drive back with his newly acquired van and there would be a sufficient number of drivers for all the vehicles which needed to return to Peoria. I did not learn this until very shortly after getting up this morning. As this fact had very little bearing on my day (James was going to be gone for aproximately the same amount of time as he would on a normal work day) I would not have learned about it even then except for one minor hiccup in their plans–James forgot his driver’s license.

 This meant that someone–namely me–had to meet them in Morton with James’ driver’s license so he could legally drive a vehicle back from Chicago. Anyone who knows me should be very impressed that I handled this plans quite well considering that they involved

(a) driving

(b) on short notice

(c) to someplace I’d never been

(d) shortly after waking up.  

 I was a little tense as I drove down route 74, but not too bad. I had clear and simple directions. I just had to find route 55 as my first step, and shortly thereafter I would be at the approved gas station to meet James. I passed an exit for route 155 and considered the similarity between 55 and 155. I double checked my written directions. They did indeed say route 55 so I continued on my way, refusing to be lured out of my true path by a chance similarity. 

 Two exits and half a dozen cornfields later I called James to find out if, by chance, I had missed my exit. I had.

 My exit was indeed the exit for route 155 which I had so cautiously ruled out. I did not panic. The only reason I didn’t panic is that I was on the phone with James who clearly had the situation under control, but still, I did exercise non-panicking skills.

 I merely continued to Goodfield as instructed, parked the van in an un-van-friendly gas station parking lot, and waited for James. When he showed up I smoothly handed over the license, pulled out of my parking space (without hitting anything!) and continued on my merry way home.

 Well, I did take a slight detour on the way back to route 74. That is to say, I was already thinking what a splendid blog post this would make, and completely missed my turn.  But I turned around quite neatly in the bit of abandoned parking lot entrance that wasn’t roped off, so that hardly even counts as an adventure. Which in this case doesn’t bother me one bit.

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“Is something wrong?”

“Yes–my spaghetti isn’t potty trained.” 

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“What was that for?”

“What do you mean ‘what was that for’? You tied a napkin around my wrist!”

Happily Kathey was able to make it tonight though she sat next to Moriah and they talked to each other through most of dinner and so she missed most of the conversation during dinner. We ate spaghetti and bread and talked about some racial heresy I just heard about tonight. We talked about racism and I had fun using the most derogatory racial slur I could think of to refer to Seth’s and my Hispanic heritage. We talked a little bit about Second Kings and then Kathey joined the conversation and I summed up the last few minutes worth in a couple of sentences. Seth and Crystal walked down and signed the contract for the house and James threw a napkin at me at least twice. There was a rather spectacular diaper disaster, though not so spectacular that I will have nightmares tonight. The kids ran around outside catching fireflies and Noah started falling apart. In a couple of months we won’t have to pile into the van and drive away. We will walk down the block and be home. Home. I’m looking forward to that very much.

 

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The contract in signed! There is a house in the city of Peoria that is earmarked for, nay, promised to us. It will be ours. The contract is signed, I think the money is falling into place and we will soon be moving into our new home. Barring some great, unforeseen misfortune the latest we will be moving is the end of July.

I am very excited. Can you tell? We will be living across the street and eight houses down from the Lansberrys with direct line of sight from one front porch to another. We will be sharing an alley with Kathey whom we have adopted and who needs us for family just as we need her. We will be living a short walk away from One World coffee shop, Campus Towne (which is a good sized shopping plaza with a dollar store, a Save-A-Lot, a pub and other sundry niftiness), an Asian grocery store and the fabulous, fabled Vietnamese lunch buffet. And I think this house will help us function as a family like we want to. We could have a sitting room set up in typical Seth-and-Crystal style and the television will be in a different room so you don’t have to be constantly reminded that it’s there. The kitchen will be lovely with a nice pass-through window in front of the sink so someone could sit at the breakfast bar and chat with me while I do dishes. It will be painted the colors we want and we won’t have to lift a finger. We do have to fix up our current house, but there is just about no work for us to do at the new house.

So I am really, very much excited and very grateful that God would give us this thing we have wanted for so long. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!

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Are there eyeballs on the ceiling I don’t know about?

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