Reality Strikes

Happy Epiphany!

I trust you all have survived the holiday rush and are ready for the long cold slog of January, February and March. Almost bought a big red heart of candy to console myself as the polar winds began to rush in yesterday. Feel certain we, or at least people we know, will freeze to death, or maybe it will just be our hearts.

I took a little unannounced blog break, you might have noticed, to grapple with the kitchen and the office and the laundry. I succeeded at the first two and continue to fail terribly at the last. Every time I get to the point where I could get on top of it, I don't push myself over the summit but slide miserably and catastrophically back down into the mire. I could go on taking about the laundry for some time but it's so discouraging I will just leave it to your imagination.

No, the true happiness is that Matt, against his will, cut the legs on my desk down.

It is so short and so fine. I imagine very tall people must feel constantly out of sorts, like everything hasn't been made for them and they have to lean, say over the kitchen sink at church, craning and stooping and permanently spoiling their backs. I feel it the other way, like I am reaching and stretching and having to find stools to climb up on, and am, frankly, not welcome in this world made for people five feet five inches to six feet ten but no taller. I would cut down all my kitchen counters if I could, and my dining room table, and, most of all, the height of the stove at church which makes me feel a fool and a knave trying to perch on a stool stirring my big pot of soup. So to have one place, the place where I might actually work, to be at the right proportions, my feet on the floor and my back up right, not slumped over or straining, to be able to sit there and be, is really lyrically fine.

Plus I've reclaimed it from twelve years of children who thought it was their desk to sit on and destroy.

The fancy Russian Nesting Dolls and the Swedish Horses and the Tiny Rose Tea Set are on a new shelf in the living room, exactly where they were before, still reachable. But I have a place to put tape and my good pens and paints and the books that I am actually reading and the two little Wyeth paintings that I printed off the interest and stuck onto card stock. Long to see the real ones some day.

And in the kitchen, in a stroke of genius, I moved the glasses nearer to the fridge so that someone wanting a drink of water doesn't have to navigate around the big red table and back, trying to leap over the dishwasher which is always open and never closed. And I shoved all the cookie cutters into the very back of a cupboard, like Hiedi with her winter clothes, pretty sure that I won't be needing them for quite some time. It's just more in order and easier and better. The inside of the cup, as it were, is cleaner, even though the outside of the cup is still a complete wreck.

So it's back to school and real life today. We're going to brave the polar vortex to go pay our enormous libarary fine and try to make them believe that we really really really don't have Mr. Putter Pours the Tea and could they please have mercy on us and just let us pay for the wretched thing. A lesson in responsibility and facing down fear and then maybe actually crying, to see if that will move them. And for Epiphany Supper we're going to make something Moroccan, and maybe lie and say that it's from Persia. Just kidding, we won't lie, we just won't even mention it because we'll be taking down the tree and there'll be lots of screaming about that so as we won't notice what we're eating.

Hope you all have a warm and happy day.