Lettuce Remember

Who would ever think that something as lame as cleaning a few heads of romaine lettuce could give me a warm fuzzy of sorts and effect the rest of my day for the better...



It's been one of those days, the kids are screaming, the repairman comes, the cleaning never seems to end. And yet, I feel this overwelming sense of accomplishment. I've needed that feeling for awhile now. I've been really struggling with the whole simplifying our life process even though it really is something I want to achieve for us as a family. Nevertheless, the constant work I am putting into it is making me tired, cranky and frustrated. There is just too much clutter in our house, our life and my mind at any given moment. The biggest part of it all is how miserable we are here and the everyday struggle to try and be happy where we are (to coin the phrase "bloom where you are planted" rings a bell) without letting go of the hope, no the expectancy of someday soon getting to go back home to Alaska. I don't want to look back on the years we've spent here and think that I wasted so much time or missed out on so much with the girls. I want us to have good memories here too.

I got the girls settled in with their lunch and was starting in on mine (a salad) when I had visions of a friend of ours, Penny, cleaning romaine lettuce at her sink much like I was cleaning it at mine. It was like a porthole of memories from a life that seems like another world away from here....Going to Penny and Jon's house for dinner was something that I would drop ANYTHING for. It was an event that was sure to be momentus in the fact that we enjoyed their company so much we didn't even have to be doing anything special. There was something great about going and sitting in Penny's kitchen at the isle and watching her put together one of her masterpiece dinners. We would drink (she introduced me to white Russians- thanks Penny!) and laugh and just hang out. I don't know if having people over stressed her out or not but if it did you would never know it by the way she was always just so layed back and inviting. Theirs is one of the homes in Alaska that I want to emulate in mine...it's a feeling of feeling safe that I want our kids to feel when they are at home and a feeling I hope our visitors feel when they walk in the door to ours. I don't know if I got that feeling because of the house itself, which I doubt since I couldn't tell you much about it, or if it came more from the warm friendship we found in a cold and blustery wilderness we know as life in Alaska.