I’ve been losing myself in homey things. Cleaning the apartment, unwrapping wall hangings from packing paper and hanging them. We’re a few weeks from our one-year anniversary in our home here, but I think the early months were so full of practicality that hanging up pretty things was left incomplete for awhile. We’re still missing some relations from our wall of family photos, but it’s getting there. Lucy loves to be held up so she can see the pictures up close, stick her small finger out to make contact as her own language floats like bubbles out of her mouth. It is a love song.

Our family changes, so how we inhabit our space is fluid. Already I’ve rearranged the girls’ clothes countless times, switching out sizes and seasons. Lucy’s crib is disassembled, and she’s learning to sleep on her floor bed, sometimes transferring to our bed before morning. I wonder when the girls will be sharing a room, when they will keep each other company through the night. In the meantime, I relish in feeling my little one’s breath in the wee hours, feeling her tiny fingers reach out to find my cheek. Soon she will be all angles and length like her sister, hardly pausing to look back and wave before running to meet her future.

I’ve also been designing and sewing clothes for Amelia’s Knitted Babe. This is slow work for me, as I don’t really know what I’m doing and do all the work by hand. But I have an outlet for the part of me that always wanted to be a fashion designer, and I feel like the shoemaker’s elves when she wakes in the morning to a magic surprise. Amelia is especially good at expressing appreciation, so when she exclaims, It’s bea-u-tiful, Mom!, I resolve to make her twenty more.

So, all these ordinary things have my attention woven into them. I sweep, I mop my wood floors to a warm shine, hoping all the time that dull parts of my soul are shined in the process. Forays into imaginary worlds for me must be balanced by firm footing in my external reality, a mountain pose in the now. I’m soaking in this quote today:

The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.

–Robert Louis Stevenson