Someone Somewhere

This afternoon it was raining lightly outside but inside our house real storms were brewing. 

For one thing, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.  I'm sufficiently better that I should stop whining but I still feel like whining.  Because I'm not all the way better.

Then there was the clutter.

My children leave the books they're reading (Braeden) and writing (Emma) everywhere.  Then I saw the book I'm reading on the table and Adam's scriptures too.  We're all a mess.

Then the shoes.  I reprimanded my kids for their shoes that were flung hither and yon by the front door then I hoped they wouldn't notice my shoes that weren't put away either.

It's really hard to get your kids to be perfect when you're not.

But I still try.

And I don't even want to go into the piano books or Legos.

I was increasingly cranky and increasingly telling children with my hoarse voice to pick that up!  Now pick that up!

Then the phone rang and it was my sister's voice, chipper and buoyant.  She was calling me from a beach in Mexico.

She said, "How ARE you?"

I said, "Cranky.  And Miserable."

She said, "Maybe I don't want to talk to you."

I said, "Probably not."  But she was undeterred and soon enough had me cheered up because you can't be uncheered by an Olivia.  I was pulling laundry out of the dryer while we chatted and one of my sheets was in shreds.  Shreds.  The inside of my dryer doesn't have fangs or claws.  I checked.  I don't know what happened to my sheets.

But I started grumbling all over again as I tried to untangle and make sense of the twisted mess of laundry.

Olivia said, "This isn't your day."

I said, "No.  But you're on a beach in Mexico."  She'd told me all about taking a glorious nap on the beach and of the magnificent shrimp she'd eaten...the best of her life.

I said, "I'm glad that someone somewhere is having a wonderful day."

And I really meant it.  Because there are wonderful days in the world and just because for me, today wasn't one of them, I know that one will come back around.

They always do.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations.  They presented him the words:  "And this, too, shall pass away."  How much it expresses!  How chastening in the hour of pride.  How consoling in the depths of affliction.

Abraham Lincoln