I’ve been housebound all weekend, not because of the sub-zero temperatures (see kitchen window! below), but because of a good old fashioned head cold. Sniffles and sneezes, and mounds of kleenex everywhere. I had chicken soup and a strawberry smoothie for lunch, though. We’ve had a fire in the fireplace going all day and I’m wearing comfy fleece pants. There’s not much else I can do besides turn in early and hope for sleep.
But my sleep has been fitful of late in this new year. All these voices--some dead, some not--won’t let me rest peacefully. It isn’t exactly that I hear voices, like Joan of Arc, (haven’t donned any armor yet), but sentences and phrases anxiously reverberate through my mind whenever I’m at the edge of consciousness. Maybe I’ve read all I need to read for a little while.
I keep turning over in my mind that John Seymour quote that there is no job more creative than that of creating a real home.
What, I wonder, does he mean by home? He can’t mean just the private life that takes place within four walls. It’s not enough; surely even he must have a greater notion of home. Working energetically and happily to establish a home has been enough these past few years, but I sense things are changing. We now manage adequately with very part-time help. The division of labor seems fair. The child-rearing is tag-team. We’ve raised a small child from birth to age six, and though our work is far from over, it requires more consideration and psychology now than brute force labor. I’ve carved out some time for pursuing a centering line of thought. It all runs relatively smoothly, except for the sock business.
But I gradually realized, however, that if I continued to dedicate myself only to cooking or homemaking or child-rearing, I’d soon be running into ridiculous, obsessive territory. Cooking excessively complicated or fancy meals, for example, just to challenge myself and then being resentful if they weren’t appreciated.
One must never, never cook to the point of resentment.
No, I don’t want to be that sort of woman (and if you watch Desperate Housewives, you know the sort I mean). I can accept, happily, that I’m not as necessary as I used to be, timewise, so it’s time for me to move on, to expand the idea of home to include, community, nation, world. . .time to struggle to get out of the bungalow kitchen, so to speak.
A few weeks ago, at, of all strange things, a post-theatre-performance party in honor Irish fiddle duo of Hayes and Cahill, I ran into the nurse who had attended me during Kipp’s birth six years ago. She seemed to remember every detail of the brutal, but euphoric experience. Anyway, she told me they were in desperate need of Spanish translators at the hospital and asked me please to get on the translator list. So I have since picked up the phone and made several persistent phone calls, to varying voice mails, trying to offer my assistance. Of course, when one wants to do something “officially”, there are many official hoops to jump through. No one ever makes it easy. But they have to be certain of my fluency and I’ll go through whatever certification they require. I’m only five minutes from the hospital and I think I could be handy and useful; also, it would be good for me to deal with people on a face to face basis again. I’ll still devote my mornings to my history project and my domestic work only takes the afternoons. There’s certainly enough time in a life to help out, to use one’s capabilities, to tend to responsibilities and still take the sweet approach to life.
Yet it requires a certain ruthlessness, doesn’t it? Very much a sense that you must be on your guard, if you’re going to stand any chance of accomplishing what you want to in this life. I feel like the time when I could fritter time away now belongs well to the past. The funny thing is I don’t even pine for it.
6:33:35 PM 
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