Just checking in. I'm still reeling because of what choosing contentment can do and feel like and change. 

My previous discontent was rather like that, "...a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump," verse and yes, I'd become one large lumpy complainer. But what a grand difference to choose a different land, to leave the future alone and instead, brighten and make sweet my present. 

Bloom where I am planted and all that.

Anyway, I'm actually already rereading Thoughts of Home after having bought and read the sequel, If These Walls Could Talk. Both books are perfect summer books, and well, there's a paragraph from the essay, The Love Nest, which I want to share. The author describes how she felt when she and her husband moved out of the home where they'd raised their family, this after a time of clearing away and cleaning out and asking their grown children to come and haul all their stored stuff away:

"By moving day, the feelings had spent themselves, and as Our Van was taking things away to storage and Their Van was bringing things in, I felt light of head and heart. I felt footloose and emancipated and about twenty-five years old, something in me had shifted into another gear. It has been this way from that hour. Miraculously for both of us the letting-go was swift and complete, accompanied by a huge surge of energy propelling us toward the new, the uncluttered, the small."

My eyes widened when I discovered that because it described how I've felt since Naomi, at 25, moved into her own place. And I guess I've been shocked over the freedom, the saying good-bye not just to our daughter, but to a whole era from my life. 

I'd so needlessly dreaded this time. Man.

And just this whole thing of "waiting well" has reminded me of the years when a young Naomi could not appreciate my love of all things domestic. She often hinted that Life's best things were ones you garnered outside of home. How washing dishes, gardening and sewing slipcovers were for those who had no life.

And of course, that hurt, especially when all along I'd hoped she'd come to appreciate at least the fact I stayed home and did them so to sweeten life for the three of us.

But I waited, hoping she'd see the light. Yet I didn't always wait well, and that is my regret. 

If only I'd have waited well, for now? Naomi is becoming domestic around her home in her own creative ways, making me often smile. She visits Salvation Army on its half-off days and finds cute curtains, couch pillows, dishes and then arranges them at home. And too, she loves to cook healthy meals inside the blue glass casserole dishes I gave her.

And you know? I've not yet even planted a vegetable garden this year, but this weekend Tom and I stopped by the yard sale Naomi and her neighbor held and what did we see in front of Naomi's half of her duplex?

A vegetable garden.

One with tomatoes,squash and the strawberries she'd asked me to let her bring home and the lemon balm and purple basil from back there, also. She walked us around her garden's edge, told us about each plant and even asked for advice about how to make things grow--

--and I thought, if only I'd waited well while waiting for this! Oh, how glorious those old days would have been when sprinkled with the sweetness of Faith.


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"Well done, thou good and faithful servant." ... Matthew 25:21