Romance

This week’s theme, “Romance”.  Make sure you trip over to my sideboard and see what the others have, maybe later this week I could actually update it and you can see who wins but then again this is me, don’t hold you breath…

Oh so many things I headed out to take pictures of including my new tractor!  Instead I caught a glimpse of Momma and her kitten and knew that this is what spoke of romance for me today.

It’s scenes like this, impossible to contrive, that speak volumes to me as to why and how we, Dirt and I, and Bet too, live here.  The metal washtub wasn’t meant to be sitting here, but it got tucked up here on the Fiber House porch, just cuz. 

Our lives here at Vicktory Farm & Gardens will always be a lot messy and a lot seemingly chaotic and fractured.   It isn’t because we don’t know how to be organized, clean and extremely tidy.  Dirt claims he is, but like his physic, he is just thirty-one years out of shape and all for the same reason. (That’d be me as the reason.)  And I know that I was, prior to the end of my first year of marriage. 

I came from a very tidy, very structured home.  Nothing came and went willy nilly.  We had two places in our home that were allowed to be slightly disarrayed.  The junk drawer by the telephone and my father’s work bench in the basement.  Just the bench.

Fortunately Dirt felt that the airplane parts that he brought home were beautiful enough to be able to sit in our living room until he took them back or farther on to where they were going.  I say fortunately, because it quickly began my lesson in letting go, and letting in. 

As a single woman working several jobs at a time or school and a job, I was rarely in my apartment and because the building was full of old people I rarely entertained there, so it rarely was disturbed from the very photo-op position I put it in when I would leave for work or school or to meet up with friends.  The bathroom at first glance looked like it had just been done up but yet used.  And the kitchen was the same, with the cookbook open to some yummy recipe and the tea towel “carelessly” tossed on the mix-master.  The living room was the same, spotless but nothing perfectly folded, unless you had watched me and saw that the haphazardly abandoned afghan was actually draped carefully into its position.   

It appeared hap hazard, lived in, comfortable, but in reality I’m not sure it could have survived people or if the people could have survived my need to keep it just so. 

What does all this yammering about neat and tidy have to do with romance and what does the header photo have to do with romance? 

Even if your definition of romance takes a long pause at the junction of a man and a woman falling in love or staying in love or rekindling love, you have to admit that even that narrow definition of romance causes things to be a bit disheveled, disturbed, shaken up, out of the ordinary, unexpected, surprising, uncontrolled, adventurous.

I’ve learned over the years that I prefer people to structure. I’m not saying that it is right, just right for me.  I’ve learned that I prefer God over all.  But often God asks me to do something when I’m in the middle of something else, a lot like people do.  I don’t always, but over the years I retrained myself, actually the Holy Spirit retrained me, to put that call above what I was already doing. To drop everything and go a different direction.  I began to allow people, and God, to romance me.  Throw me off balance, stir me up, confuse me, take control out of my hands.  Maybe I learned it too well and I should be more concerned with the mess, but Inevitably, whether it is immediately noticeable or farther down the road, soothing things, uplifting moments, surprising pictures come out of the fall-out of being called, of being romanced.