Faith is the Opposite of Despair
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We’ve been drowning in tomatoes in New York. The CSA program at our local farm has been sending us home with heavy bags full of gorgeous, fresh tomatoes from the plants which are very happy after all the rain and sunshine this season. I feel tremendous inner pressure not to waste a single one, so I’ve started making tomato sauce that we’ll freeze and enjoy in the winter, when these warm, end of summer days are long gone.
In my sauce making frenzy last week, I turned on the Vitamix without having the lid tightly fastened and within a split second of realizing my error, the whole corner of my kitchen where I was working looked like a murder scene. So… that was fun.
I had to take absolutely everything off the counter and deep clean the mess out of every last nook and cranny because it was really bad.
And as I was deep cleaning, I flashed back to when the kitchen was first installed. When everything was fresh and new. No clutter on the countertops. No pictures tacked to the fridge door. No dust along the window sills.
My kitchen was the last stage of the renovations I took on when the kids and I moved to this house 6 years ago after my divorce was finalized. My divorce and the closing on my house both happened in quick succession. It felt like everything at once. It was everything at once. I was overwhelmed but I was also overjoyed because we’d been living in a hotel, living in a kind of suspended reality, with a lot of unknowns and moving to the house felt like we could finally begin the next chapter.
Before all of the electrical sockets were finished being wired and before the sheetrock was painted over, the kids and I wrote our wishes for our lives on the walls of the kitchen. We started writing full sentences — like formal affirmations — and then we just ended up writing words like: JOY, PROTECTION, PEACE IN THIS HOUSE, LOVE.
I was remembering all of this as I scrubbed the tomato explosion off the walls and the countertops. There is so much love in this house. Not just because of the wishes and the words we wrote on bare sheetrock when these rooms were still under construction, which have seeped deep into the foundation of the walls by now, but because of the intention in our hearts, as the inhabitants of this space, to write these things in…
