Mi Casa

We are definitely home and have hit the ground running, it would seem. Yesterday Lily, Jason, May, and Jessie (who has the cutest new short hair-do you ever saw) gathered at Lily and Jason's old apartment to finish up the packing and do the cleaning. We had buckets and mops and brooms and Fabuloso and Kaboom! and other liquids of mass cleanification and we went at it with a vengeance. I took on the kitchen and scrubbed the stove, the cabinets, the sink, the refrigerator while May did bedrooms and Jessie did the bathroom and Jason took off to do something (because he and Mr. Moon had started at six-thirty in the morning, moving the heavy stuff) and Lily mostly sat on a yoga ball and bemoaned the fact that their new house was not going to be ready to move into for a few more days and I completely understand that. She is at the final stages of pregnancy and she wants to NEST and by God, she should be able to nest and she will be. Just not today.

Today she's out in Lloyd with me and she and Jason are staying here for the duration and I can't tell you how much I love having them. I was cooking last night (COOKING!) and thinking that really there is not much I love more than cooking for my babies and being with my babies. After ten days of not cooking, I wasn't sure I could still do it, but yes. I can.

The girls and I had so much fun cleaning Lily's apartment yesterday that I suggested to May that we start a cleaning business for the purpose of helping people get their deposits back. We could call the business "Split Your Deposit!"
It's so much easier to clean when all the stuff is gone from a house or an apartment. Just empty floors and walls and cabinets and refrigerators.

We did some singing and a little dancing around and a lot of laughing. A lot of laughing. We even made Lily laugh a time or two and she certainly made us laugh. The girls told me how Jessie had instructed her daddy to wipe out the high shelves the other night and how he'd done it. "We're the boss of each other," he told the kids. Really, the kids are the bosses of us and they know it and so do we. We discussed how Mr. Moon is getting a bit bossier in his older age and Lily said, "We just ignore him," and I thought that was funny because I never can. But then, I'm his wife, not his child, and there's the difference.

As I was cleaning, I was thinking about how it was this time last week in Cozumel. Mr. Moon and I would leave our beautiful little condo and when we'd come back a few hours later, the room would be completely tidy, the bed made with all ten thousand pillows and smelling delightfully of Fabuloso, the floors so clean I'd gladly eat off them. One of the sweetest moments of the entire trip was when we came in once and the maid was there, cleaning. We were tired and hot and laid down on the bed after talking to her for a moment in our broken Spanish and asking her if she could find a different blanket for us.

We drowsed on the bed as she quietly finished up, the blue green waters of the Caribbean right outside of my closed eyes. We actually fell asleep and then woke up when the sweet, tiny woman tiptoed back into the room to bring us the blanket we'd asked for. I felt completely and utterly taken care of in that moment in that room by that woman.

"Gracias," I said. "Gracias para todo," which I hope meant "thank-you for everything."
She smiled and tiptoed away.

There is part of me which wishes she could see me in my "real" life, scrubbing things and dealing with chicken shit and digging in the garden and cooking for my family. Not to say "Look, I can work too," but to say- "This is what I usually do. Thank you so much for doing it for me for a few days. I appreciate it more than you know."

It was good to be taken care of. It was sweet to surrender to that care.
And now I'm home and it's good to take care of others. That has a sweetness to that too. A purpose.

Here are a few pictures from the sweetness which is my life here in Lloyd today.

The pinecone lillies. They will turn bright red soon.


My moon and stars watermelon.

My baby chickens, trying to come out of the chicken house before the big girls notice they're in their space. See Henry? He's the red dude with the comb and wattle. Every now and then he does a kamakaze flight into the big coop, dancing around and avoiding the hens. These are short flights and he quickly retreats back to the safety of the run but I can tell he's trying like hell to claim part of the good life for his little flock. Good rooster. Henry is a good rooster.

And this is a good life, made all the sweeter because we've worked hard to make it real. The garden, the chickens, the children who can come home when they need to, who can rest and be taken care of by Mama.

So here's my prayer today:

Gracias. Gracias para todo.

I mean it.