Day of Wine and Roses

Today was great. Liturgy this morning was beautiful. I hardly even yawned, which I was remarkable, having stayed up so late (um, early?) watching John play Raving Rabbids. And I might have been playing a game on the computer and drinking lots of iced tea. We finally rolled into bed around 1 a.m. We are partiers, for sure.

After we got home, John got to work on his back yard landscape project, part one. The dump truck that brought our garden dirt also brought a load of rocks, and they’ve been sitting in the driveway for two weeks. He had to finished digging out a little trench to put the edging material down in before he could put down fabric and rocks. Now, our back yard is composed of 85% clay and 15% cottonwood roots. You could build houses with this stuff. It was a lot of work, and he did it all himself! I was very impressed. He also drank about two quarts of iced tea. Whew. Thirsty work, that.

I spent some time refashioning some of William’s pants into a pair of shorts. (Note that these were not made from scratch so I am not violating my promise to make myself something. Plus I went to get my skirt fabric and somehow I managed to forget to buy thread. But I have five different shades of pink! I have a daughter and four nieces. Sigh). They had a hole in the knee and a missing button. I cut them off and hemmed them! I was pretty proud of myself. I guarantee you won’t notice that the hems are a little uneven, because he won’t be still long enough for you to get a good look at them. Not like he’s going to wear them to a wedding, anyway. I found their missing button and now he has another pair of shorts! Lately I have a lot more time than money, so where before I might figure, “I can just go to Target and buy another pair of shorts for $9.99,” now I realize that’s not necessarily true. Kind of wasteful anyway, when I have this time, and if I weren’t sewing his shorts I’d be doing something really useless like surfing the net.

We had planned to have steaks for dinner…a really, really rare treat around here, maybe once a year or less. I picked up some nice ones from the clearance meat bin (which as I’m typing, sounds kind of bad, but there are some great deals in there on good stuff. At least I’ve never seen anything green). John was still working so I prepped a caesar salad, baked potatoes, set the table, etc. I even remembered we had a bottle of wine and got that out. So then, not wanting to do nothing while he was out breaking his back working, I prepped some berries and taught my daughter (and myself!) how to make creme anglaise.

We sat down to a fabulous dinner (the perfectly cooked steaks totally forgive all the burnt hamburgers from last summer) and I looked out to the yard and was startled to notice our neighbor’s big rose bush just starting to bloom. And I thought, how did I miss this? Years past I always look forward to the end of May to see the roses. And suddenly, there it is. I felt especially thankful.

I was trying to think of some deep theological tie-in here, but I can’t just now. This morning there was a memorial for several people, and a goodbye blessing for two families going to seminary. And I was sad, but even more than that, I had this overwhelming feeling that everything would be okay, because in the end we’ll all be together. And I am grateful.