From Duty to Joy

...not our clothes line... we don't have any adorable bunnies in our area, but isn't he cute!

One of the best things that about living in an older home is that things are (as a rule)  family size and built to last.  The dining room?  Large enough for a crowd. The bath tub?  Still in great shape, and I bet a young mom could bathe at least four small children at a time! The bedrooms?  Designed to house more than one child. The clothesline?  Ah.... steel poles, 45 feet apart, and four wonderful rows of clothes drying goodness. I love it.

I didn't start out loving the idea of hanging out our wash to dry, but with a vintage clothes line beckoning to me, I felt I didn't have a choice. It was something I felt was my duty...saving our family money and using what the Lord has placed right there in our back yard to meet our needs. But now, hanging out the wash is one of the best parts of my day.  It is the semicolon between history and math...a pause between two related sections of my day. It is an import break in ideas that causes the latter subject to begin with a peaceful lowercase letter. It is a bit of fresh air in the middle of the morning, and a time for the little boy of the house to run outside and  help mom by carrying out the empty basket and handing her the clothes pins. In the afternoon there is another load to go out on the line....an opportunity to listen to the children enjoying their time outside without hovering over them, and the chance to see if the red-tailed hawk will be back. It is time for me to realize that my small amount of time and energy, combined with God's sunshine, are enabling our clothes to dry free of charge, while others are paying their machines to do this work for them. And later in the evening, with the last load in hand, it is a time for me to go out into the dusk alone. I often jokingly sing, " I Go to the Clothesline Alone" (to the tune of  " I Go to The Garden Alone"), because don't we moms cherish those few moments of alone time when the Lord gives them to us!

I once heard a home school mom say that she punctuated her day with her own little "happiness islands".  It sounded a little fruity to me at the time, and it still does.  I don't want to be running off doing my own thing in the midst of the day, focusing on my happiness when I should be focusing on the Lord and on my family. But I do need some semi colons in the midst of my daily paragraphs. Just a "slow" task now and then, preferably one that takes me outdoors and gives me time with an individual child or alone.  The Lord is good to turn our duties into joys!