Rain in February
On the wet stuff and housework
Here in Wyoming, it’s rare that we get rain. We’re at an altitude called high desert, our house sitting on ground higher than 5,000 feet above sea level, with another 3,000 feet rising south of us on Casper Mountain.
Way up here, precipitation is scarce. It collects and settles in—or blows through on—lower climes. Or it gets caught, trapped by cold that mostly inevitably crystallizes and freezes it.
But a few days ago, it rained. It was a cold rain, the temperatures in the lower 40s, but the wet clearly soddening windshields, turning the ground a dark gray and the skies leaden. I smelled the moisture and thought of my kids, who identify rain with the green and fertile Midwest—“it smells like Missouri!” It also reminded me of spring, still a long ways off.
When it rains, I feel like I have permission to nest, to sit—okay, mostly stand—with a steaming cup of peach tea. So the other day, I did. In the midst of unexpected events, more things to manage and figure out and weather, as the soft patter dropped outside, I took a breath and tackled a little household mess. Perhaps because rain is cleansing, I felt like I could be, too, at least in a small domestic way.
As the winter progresses and the infant grows, I increasingly see the need to do things beyond sustaining him and keeping his little body warm and clean.1 Detritus from the last near two months creeps in corners; projects at standstills beckon. Kids keep growing, and the clothes that need sorting collect, overflowing drawers and accumulating haphazardly in closets. Papers that need filing mound messily, books that need reshelving pile awkwardly in precarious stacks. Work lurks and leers like a slouching menace, passive but immobile, and it crowds my sight and clouds my mental landscape. I want to clear it away, wipe our home clean.
And for what? A wise lady I love asked me this. We were speaking of our mutual desire for order in our homes and the endless work such order demands of us. This was not a complaint but comments on reality. For this is how things are in our fallen world; by the sweat of our brows we toil. But if we could reach an ideal, the Perfectly Clean and Ordered Home, our living places completely spotless with every item in its place, surfaces flat and empty and gleaming, what then? Order is a gift, but it should not become an idol.
I do not say this to rewrite the phrase about leaving the dusting to spend time with the kids. Actually, I think kids can and should learn to dust, and to clean, and to care for the things God gives us for our necessity and to crown us with abundance. But our lives are seasonal, and they are cyclical. Our housework of ordering is also one of management, never one where everything is complete. I have to remember this when I feel stressed at what I see as disorder all over our home.
We homemakers and keepers are not machines. Like the man who hoes corn, we take moments to rest between our labors, stretching at the ends of rows, pausing to gaze skyward at passing larks. And like him, we constantly need reminding for what we finally work. He hoes the weeds so that the corn can grow so his family can eat. He does not see only the threat of choked life from the weeds, the disorder of competition in the soil. He sees one step in the progression toward a harvest-ready crop. We also cook and wash and clean so that our families can function, but ultimately so that they can grow and live for God. I have to be reminded that the work, though daunting and even overwhelming at times, is also its own marker of life. It speaks to growth that is happening all around me, the messy, muddy, and the miraculous.
So sometimes, or actually in all times, living involves moments of being still and receiving from God what He alone can give. He opens His hand and showers upon His beloved children everything we need. Material items for growing children, like books and clothing. Papers that speak of blessings—cards of congratulations, hospital bills of past care. And the children themselves, including the new and especially needy ones. And we, like the ground, get what He gives. How generous He is, to create us to live, and to sustain us without any merit on our part.
The sun is shining again here today, and that is another truly beautiful blessing. But I appreciate the rain, too, the gentle moisture that falls without me asking, that softens the ground and my heart so that I can take up, with renewed purpose, the work before my hands.
Not that I will stop or pull back from caring for him; how do you think I’m finding the time to write this? Breastfeeding can provide a means to a life of the mind as well as life to a growing boy.