If I were to open my heart I’d say a lot of things right now. Things like, “It’s Friday, folks. Hip hip hooray!”
Only it’s raining. And I volunteered to pick up trash tomorrow — in the rain. Ohhh, goodie.
Put your money where your mouth is.
No, really. It won’t be so bad. My friends will be there. I can sleep when we’re done. Really.
If you say so.
I say so. Except . . . When I was a kid, I thought my parents had it all figured out. I thought that when I grew up, I’d have it all figured out, too.
Oh, honey.
I know. I know.
Speaking of “honey,” people say funny things in the South. Like “Sweet Pea.” And “you’uns.” And “y’all.” And I realized tonight: I’m getting used to it. It will feel strange to visit California and not hear, “You’uns ain’t done nothin’ wrong, y’all ‘ear?” or “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” . . .
. . . It’s not so different from listening to Mandarin in Asia, actually. It was strange to return home and understand conversations around me then, too.
Is that so? Hmm . . .
Conversations are great, yes. But what about communication?
You would ask.
Communication is key — in everything. It’s why we can’t just all get along. We don’t seek to listen and understand before first being heard. This goes for everyone.
And me too. Me too.
But . . . “home.” What is home? Is it the bed upon which we lay our head? The person with whom we don’t hold back? The thing we’re really good at? People boast that their homes are the BEST EVER. But have they traveled the world? Have they seen everything it has to offer?
They don’t have to. Home is where they’re comfortable.
I see, I see. But not for me. Home is where my heart is, but it’s more than that, too.
SO much more.
SO.
I should really go to bed. But I have dishes to do and wars to fight first. (This poem inspired me the other night, though. Lord knows I need to lay off the Pledge®.)
shift 
I love that poem 😊 it made me think of this quote “Don’t cook. Don’t clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum – “My God, the floor’s immaculate. Lie down, you hot bitch.” ~Joan Rivers 😂 have fun with the trash!
Lol! I hate the gender roles that play out in both the poem I posted and the Joan Rivers quote. That said, I’ve always been super clean and do need to scale back… I might beg to differ with Rivers about the cooking piece, though. Many men I know love to brag about their wife’s cooking. I’m not a great cook, but not terrible, either. Mostly it’s just a lot of prep work and clean up that I do NOT find enjoyable. (The dust is enough! Haha!) Cheers! (And sadly, I didn’t make it out to trash clean-up. I was more tired than I thought last night and slept rather late!)
Sleeping is good, much nicer than trash cleaning :)
It sounds like a lot of things buzzing around in your both your mind and heart. Really do wish we could catch up in real life and sit down somewhere quite for a drink and just talk 😐💙 Communication in key to not just getting along with each other but understanding each other – sometimes the latter doesn’t happen even if we listen but that is another topic altogether. Home is such a complex thing for us who have moved around. To me home is a concept…a space where I am familiar with, be it my own space or a space with people who somewhat get me…the key is familiarity here and a sort of routine since I like things to be constant and not unstable.
Hope you got the dishes done. It sounds like a calm way to wind down the week. I don’t mind doing mundane chores at home to be honest. Gives me time to think and for a moment things are simple. My Friday night was going to a Sheryl Crow concert. So out of the ordinary and I was so tired after that 😃
That’s wonderful, Mabel! Sheryl Crow would be fun to see live. And yes, I agree that doing dishes and mundane chores can be calming. I think a lot while I clean. I tend to take it to the next level, though. My apartment is almost always spotless, and I drove my ex crazy because I cleaned TOO much.
I know I talked about some complex topics in the above ramble. I specifically thought about your post on “home” when I wrote that paragraph. Home IS complex, and I suppose some of us have struggled more with the topic than others, having moved around a lot.
And yes, communication and understanding are important topics that never grows old or irrelevant. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to keep an open mind recently. Perhaps I’ll write on that soon.
Cheers! I hope you’re onto a beautiful Sunday!
No such thing as cleaning too much. We would make great flatmates. I am a big cleaner myself and any bit of mess at home has to be attended to on the day 😀
Having an open-mind is hard because we all come from a certain background, and will have our own beliefs and might stick to them…judgement will be inevitable.
Happy cleaning and thinking :)
Thanks, Mabel! And I agree about the open mind and background piece. This is why travel is so important. It can help us overcome our prejudices.
My volunteer work today was fun and fulfilling. I helped teach special needs kids how to swim. But now I’m exhausted.
Good for you! I love working with kids. :) I’d like to find an organization to volunteer with regularly here — need to get on that. Sadly I just didn’t have it in me this morning and overslept. The group I was going to work with were doing some heavy-duty river clean-up on the other side of town. (I think breaking up a large fallen tree was involved.) I will join them next time.
We have an awesome organization here called Hands On Nashville with a well-maintained website hosting a calendar with lots of volunteer opportunities daily with dozens of different nonprofits. All you do is find an event that sounds up your alley, click it on the calendar, and sign up. It makes doing all kinds of volunteer activities super easy. They even keep track of your hours if you want them to!
That’s great! What a great idea… I wonder if Knoxville has something similar. I’ll have to look it up!