Sunday Notes

The house was a wreck the morning I made the bed anyway. Dishes in the sink. Laundry on the chair. The scent of drudgery in the air.

I made the bed. Smoothed the quilt. Shook out the pillows. Straightened the lamp. That was all I did. Then I went to the kitchen and started on the dishes, and the morning started making sense.

Gwen made her bed right as she got out of bed, before she even visited the bathroom. Every morning. It was not discussed. It was not a habit she tracked or a ritual she named. It was just the order of things. You got up. You made the bed. The room was ready for you when you came back to it.

She didn't make the bed to be productive. She made it because she was a person who deserved to come home to a made bed.

This is the difference I am still learning: Self-respect is not the same thing as productivity. The made bed is not a task crossed off a list. It is a small statement that you exist, that you matter, that the room you sleep in is worth tending.

The house was a wreck. The bed was made. That's still something.

I have moved it more times than I can count. New houses, new walls, the same small nail going into fresh drywall, a little lower or a little higher each time until it looked right. The rooms around it have changed…the paint, the floors, the children who grew up and the grandchildren who came after. The print remains the same.

It hangs in my bedroom where I see it first thing and last thing. My name in old lettering, and under it the line that was true of me before I was anything: Consecrated to God. My mother gave it to me when I was a girl. I did not earn it. It was simply given, the way a name is given, before I'd done a single thing to grow into it.

In the design world, the thing should have been gone long ago. I watched the wall behind it go through every fashion there is, and the print outlasted them all, not because it matched the rooms, but because it matched me.

In the morning, it is the first thing that tells me who I am before the day does. At night, when the day did all it could to tell me otherwise, it confirms what I know down deep.

There is one thing on your own wall like this. You know the one. It does not go with anything, and you have never once considered taking it down.

You are allowed to keep what is true to you, longer than it stays in fashion.

Grandpa Pehrson was a florist. One rule he passed down was simple: Do not plant before Mother's Day. "There's always a cold snap right before," he'd say every year.

This year I didn't listen. After watching my spindly seedlings crawl toward the window hungry for light, I caved and planted them outside. Sure enough, we had a hard freeze warning last night. I wrapped each squash, tomato, and cucumber seedling in a bath towel and hoped for the best.

This morning I woke as the sun peeked over the mountain and eagerly awaited the warmth the day would bring. As the sun rose, the rays spread over the lawn and reached the garden. I unwrapped each tender plant to find it healthy and untouched by the frost. They live!

I think sometimes we are like those tender seedlings. We give ourselves too little credit or even the wrong kind of credit. We say we're resilient like we choose it, like we heroically decided not to give up.

But sometimes life happens. And we find we had more inside than we ever thought possible. The frost comes. And in the morning there we are, still standing...a little wilted at the tips maybe, but still alive.

As I gaze out the window watching my seedlings perk up in the warm sun, I imagine Grandpa Pehrson shaking his head at my renegade planting. But he's still smiling...at me and at the tomatoes.

They live.