The Summer of Brokenness

Here's my list:

• Our lawnmower is broken and the grass is a foot high
• The top oven no longer heats, while the bottom oven runs about 200 degrees too hot
  
• We discovered wood rot and pulled a handful off of an outdoor window casing the other day
• There is a leak in our roof that has already been fixed twice...and is still leaking
• The face of our dishwasher fell off; it gives my kitchen an unintentional, industrial look
• The toilet in the girls' bathroom in unusable; Dave tried to fix it a few weeks ago, but now it sprays water from the top of the toilet instead of the bottom when you flush
• Via CT scan yesterday, I learned that I have sinus polyps (the cause of my chronic sinus infections this spring), which will have to be surgically removed a week before school starts; recovery time is a week...

But here's the other list:

• A fellow congregant offered us a free riding lawn mower that he no longer uses
• We have a microwave...and now, an oven thermometer
• The wood rot is localized to a very small area
• The big leaks are taken care of; at least it's not running down the wall anymore
• Our urban chic dishwasher is a great ice breaker when we have people over for dinner
• The toilet is most likely an easy fix, just not by my husband
• My silly little polyps are not life threatening, just a bit uncomfortable
  

Enjoy the View

Today, while Amelia was playing some computer games and Sadie was napping, I went to the bookshelf where we keep old journals and selected one at random. Dave and I used to be avid journal writers, but life creeps in and slowly, and inevitably, the busy-ness of everyday chips away at time for solitude and self-reflection.

The journal I grabbed off the shelf today belonged to Dave. I felt at liberty to read it because he had read it to me before, when we were first dating. Page after page of this journal was filled with poetry, beautiful poetry, and before I knew it, an hour had passed; Amelia was still playing computer games and Sadie was up from her nap. Life crept back in and snapped me out of my reverie.

Dave reminds me every day why I married him. He makes me laugh out loud on a regular basis; he loves our girls in a way that I didn't know fathers could love their daughters; he takes care of our family in little ways that I don't always immediately recognize. But life creeps in. After six years of marriage, two kids, two full-time jobs and more laundry and yard work than we could have ever hoped for, we have both lost some of the serendipity of our youth. It did my heart well to revisit the passion, idealism and sensitivity of the man I fell in love with. It reminded me that he is still that man and I'm still that woman. We just have to work a little harder to find that part of ourselves these days.