One Perfect Moment

Childhood defines this moment.

From my perch on the front porch, I hear Abby chatter and holler and giggle with the neighbor kids. They run from driveway to driveway following the impulse of youth, doing whatever excites their wide-open minds.

Bikes and scooters dot the street, abandoned to new flashes of inspiration. Chalk drawings climb the driveway. Markers spill over the sidewalk into the planters.

A breeze tickles the warm spring air. The children do not notice the sun falling slowly back to the horizon.

They play for no other purpose than to thrill at being alive, together.

The evening is perfect. In the midst of global crises, politics, and religious scuttle, these children at play remind me that God really loves this world.

Home Again

On a sunny Friday morning a little over a week ago, Josh and I signed the papers that gave us the keys to our new home here in Texas. 

Over that weekend, we transported our apartment goods--the dishes and clothes and files that came from the "guts" of our house in Colorado, all the things that were tucked away in cupboards and closets that no one walking through our home-for-sale would miss--into the cupboards and closets here.  

That Monday, everything else from Colorado arrived. 

And with those belongings arrived a deep peace that must come from the soul's recognition that we are home again. 

The furniture, the art, the bedding, the decor--it seems they ought to be insignificant, mere material possessions that they are.

But their presence soothes, comforts. Their years as the backdrop of our lives has imbued them with story, with meaning, with a nostalgia that re-roots our family in its history, placing our new life in Texas in the context of our former life in Colorado.

Making our bed with the bedding we received at our wedding, arranging the kids' furniture, decorating our family room has been therapeutic, an extended exhale of the underlying tension and stress we've been carrying since moving down in August. I hadn't even recognized that our temporary set-up in the apartment had activated a general sense of alert until the wariness slipped off, leaving a quiet calm.

I see the weight lifting in the kids, too. Though they enjoyed aspects of sharing a room in the apartment, they are both embracing the respite and solitude of having their own spaces with their own beds and dressers and rockers and toys. 

Abby goes to her room and plays and plays with her dolls and horses. She has made her bed nearly every day that we've been here--a sign, I think, of how happy she is to be surrounded by her lovely things again.

Benjamin comes home from school and cozies up on his bed with his homework or a book, sinking into restful contentment. His patience is longer, his tolerance for frustration greater. 

They are remembering parts of themselves that went dormant in our transient, make-it-work season. They are stretching their spirits out again after our cramped existence. 

And they are discovering new joys. A yard in which to kick the soccer ball. A cul-de-sac full of kids. A friend on the other side of the fence. 

For however long our time in Texas lasts, we have our own sanctuary to return to each day: a home furnished with the history and memories of our life before, a familiar backdrop for the new living to come.