Kitchen

Photos of the week: (Interspersed throughout the post)

My kitchen is one of my favorite rooms in the house. It is a good thing too since I spend a LOT of time there. This led me to pondering on how we are made and why things are the way they are. It seems like eating three meals a day, or continual snacking (whatever works for you) is not very efficient. I feel that sometimes I finish cleaning up after one meal just in time to start another. Why is so much of life dedicated to food? Wouldn't it serve us better to be sustained on one meal and be able to spend extra time in more productive matters? Then again, perhaps that would leave us more time to spend in UNproductive matters.

I've been contemplating balance. With my new calling, I keep thinking that it should come with a pause button so I have time to get everything done. And then I could visit all the sisters in the ward. But then no one would grow and serve, because they would know that the Relief Society President probably was taking care of everything with her pause button. And I would not know when to stop because I would feel like I could do it all. Nope, I am pretty sure that one of the key things we have to learn while we are here in this mortal sojourn is balance. We need to prioritize and  make mistakes and reprioritize and find out what really matters to us. Heavenly Father wants to see if we will chose the right things. I know that I don't always put the right thing first. (This is blatantly obvious because I stayed up past midnight two nights in a row to read The Goose Girl—perhaps not the best prioritizing.)

This all returned to my mind this morning, because I was looking at my kitchen.

Yep, that is my kitchen and that is how it looks often. Entropy is probably strongest in the kitchen. I was sitting there thinking about how hard it is to keep the kitchen clean and that led to that pondering about too many meals a day. (Pearl only seems content these days with something in her hand. She thinks that we are eating. All. The. Time. Arg. I need to have scheduled snack times and not bend to the incessant whining and reaching in the pantry.) So, since I still lack the pause button, I just got to work and found my kitchen again.

(contented sigh) I sure love it when it is clean. And I love it most in the morning when the sun comes in and lights everything.

It feels cozy and fresh. It starts a new day. A day of choosing how I will balance. And I won't lie. It always feels easier to balance a day if you start it in a clean kitchen.