Home Making

Did anybody else think today was Friday?

After months of unemployment, the five-day work week seems interminably long.  (There were perks, see?  If only it paid better.)

Things are moving along here at home.  The only boxes left are in the garage and I'm half tempted to donate them somewhere...unopened and unpacked.  What could be in them, I wonder.  Clearly nothing vital.  I'm trying to hang the last of the pictures...a sure sign we're staying for a while, even though I keep expecting someone to show up and ask us what were doing in their house.  I still wake up and wonder where I am. 

Every morning David kisses me goodbye and goes to secure our place on the rock.  (Lindbergh's oyster bed has been heavily on my mind this week.)  I sense his giddiness as he leaves.  He is happy to be providing.  Deliriously so. 

My job is more complicated.  Because the light in my new bedroom is golden rather than blue.  The sun is coming in at a different angle, and I don't yet recognize the patterns it makes as it rises and crosses the south wall.  To calm my fears, I rise and do what I know best.  Home making.  And perhaps my brilliant skills were never more needed.  To take the uncertain and make it familiar.  To take the unknown and make it recognizable.  To take the difficult and make it a little easier with the simple rituals of daily life...food on the table, the same stone dishes being revealed by each successive bite, the smell of heat and starch as I line David's dress shirts along the end of my ironing board, the sheets and blankets whispering their old secrets as my darlings climb in bed, the circle we form on our knees at the end of day. 

To take a house and make it home.  (Good thing I'm amazing and stuff.)

In an effort to make it feel more like home, this week I did get the quilts hung.

The walls are telling me this is where I belong.

I wonder when I will believe them. 

Two Posts in One Week: It Must Be Love

(I would do this post for the picture alone.  Be still my heart.)

This morning, David leaned down and kissed me hard.  Aftershave, cologne, starch, and toothpaste.  Delicious.  He said, "Do you know where I was sixteen years ago?" 

Yes, I said.  Waiting for me.

And he was.  I had a 6 a.m. hair appointment in order to meet David at the temple in time for our sealing and I was running late.  He was standing in the foyer grinning at me from across the room when I finally arrived. 

"Yeah," he said, "Why did we get married so early?"

We couldn't wait, I said.

He smiled.  It was the exact same smile from sixteen years ago.  It always says the same thing, "Hey, we're together.  What could go wrong?"

The truth is, plenty.

After the last nine months we know that for sure.

But also, the truth is, nothing.  Nothing, really.

And after the last nine months we know that even surer.

Remember Adam and Eve?  I think about them a lot.  I think about the part when they had to leave the garden and how much sense it made and how it was part of the plan and how God gave them his blessings as they left.  And then I think about what they had for dinner that first night. 

I mean, really.

I think it's a great plan, I think they thought it was a great plan, I am sure it was the only plan that would work, but on that first night in the wilderness with the cold and the bugs and the predators and the vastness of space above them, what did they do for dinner?

But then there are moments--moments like the one I just had, when David came home, his arms full of roses, the love all over his face--when I think they didn't even care what they had for dinner.  As long as they were together.  As long as they sat across the fire, across the table, across the altar, from each other. 

I love most every thing about married life.  The waking, and working, and struggling, and laughing, and growing, and birthing, and fighting, and fixing, and praying, and necking.  But today also especially these:  the hand holding mine in the wilderness, the covenant binding us together, and the smile that still says, despite all our familiarity with the vast, gaping maw of reality, "Hey, we're together.  What could go wrong?"

The Long Overdue Update

There is no good place to start.

Let me sum up.

For a long time it felt like we had been forsaken.

For a long time it felt like we had been left alone.

For a long time I had to force myself from fear to faith, at first at the start of every day, and then at the start of every hour, and towards the end at the start of nearly every other minute.

But then, just at the moment of great alarm, salvation arrived.

Last Monday, David dressed in his new shirt and tie and drove to a new hospital and started his new job.  That same morning, after I ironed his shirt and kissed him goodbye, I met the moving trucks at our new place and started the overwhelming job of setting up house.

Savannah says that's my new favorite word.  Overwhelmed.  I said, "What do you mean?"  "Well, now you say it all the time."

Well.

The other day we had a family meeting.  I tried to tell the kids how I was feeling.  I told them it was like I was digging out from a mudslide while it was still raining.  Ethan looked outside.  To see if it was raining.

Nevermind.

So, we are starting over.  New job.  New house.  New ward.  New friends.  New schools.  New streets and grocery stores and doctors and gas stations and banks and post offices and when I drive down the street I don't know what's going to be on the next corner.  I've been to the grocery store twice and got lost coming home both times.

It won't take long I tell myself.

What's not new?  The weather.  After all those plane flights and hotels and tempting views of some gorgeous eastern rivers, the place prepared for us was on the other side of the valley.  Just an hour up the road.  No one was more surprised than I.  And I wonder when I will learn that I am not in charge.

For the record, there are joys to this new life.  My favorite:  that particular joy of greeting your husband at the end of the day.  I'm in the kitchen starting dinner.  He walks in in his shirt and tie.  Hey you.  And then a little passionate necking.  (This never gets old.)

And what I think about most as I sort and unpack and hang and rearrange, is how Sariah made a home out of a tent and how when she was unpacking carpets and dishes and liahonas out in the desert she might have used that word "overwhelmed" too.  And how even though it might not make much sense to me now, the Lord knows what he is doing.  He has a plan.

Even in the middle of the desert.