I’m sitting at home in the living room and there are the after-leavings of Monkfish Abbey and Friday morning pre-school countdown prep verywhere. From where I am sitting I can see:

• an handthrown tea mug, empty, with a sticky spoon on the floor besides it
• a vintage gold-coloured wine glass hiding behind the footstool
• several folding chairs
• the dinning room table, both leaves extended, covered in crumbs and one soggy bowl of Cracklin’ Oat Bran
(Cate’s – who ‘gets distwackted’ from clearing her place 3 mornings out of 4)
• a jar of gummy bear vitamins
• heaps of half-burned candles with wicks in need of trimming
• throw pillows in all the wrong places
• paul’s slippers in front of the ‘shoe bench’
• an arm chair heaped with stuff from my morning shopping trip including but not limited to:
o my second-hand car coat with the great copper buttons
o my poppy hand bag from the fabulous Queen Bee bags
o a Battleship game for the birthday/slumber/costume party Eden is going to tonight
o a curtain panel from Shiga’s Imports for the guest bed project I’m in the middle of
o undershirts for Eden, who is now officially considered a “highly sensitive child” (buy the book here) and gets bugged by all her shirts
o two pairs of knee socks and a set of black footless tights for me because I’m obsessed with wearing courdoroy and denim skirts all winter

There’s also a dishwasher full of mugs, wineglasses, and bowls to be unloaded and a freezer full of lasagna for our Missional Co-op dinner tonight. (Also known as a couple of ministerial families who get what we are doing and like us anyway.) The glass recycling is overflowing with wine and beer bottles and there’s about four half-finished loaves of crusty bread in various states of not-drying-out in plastic bags in the kitchen. (Soon to be converted into toasted garlic bread for the aforementioned dinner.)

As reluctant as I am to dive into the cleaning-up-and-re-setting process, I love this busy communal life. True, I am sometimes tired when friends arrive at the end of the week, and sometimes relieved when the last light is turned out and Paul and I can sink into bed. But it’s that satisfied kind of tired you know?

Yesterday I was completely toast before MFA even started. The kids are going through a very emotional patch and I’ve been stitching one or the other of them together piece by piece and least twice a day. The Wolfpup had a tough week and is still decompressing. And a friend is having realtionship/vocation/seasonal affect disorder crisis. I told Paul I felt like I’d been scooped out with a melon baler.

But today, after I dropped the kids off at school – where I daily want to crawl out of the car and prostrate myself to kiss the feet of the principal who takes my kids from me five days a week—I felt much better. I ran about purchasing various thing for half-finished art projects – or new art projects to start and leave half-finished. Then I came home to write while I wait for my midmorning coffee break with an old neighbor.

There’s really not that much to complain about, you know…