Taking Stock

A cold mist has settled across the freshly harvested corn fields while sparrows flit to the frost rimmed feeder looking for seeds on this cold November morning. The hydrangeas arch out from the gardens with an antique beauty, brittle and brilliant in the warmth of the early morning light. Tea-stained November days with brooding skies display a patina like that of a vintage piece of literature, its sepia pages holding line upon line of story. A crescent moon has been waxing, making a brief appearance in the southern skies at dusk before slipping from view behind the hip of the barn roof. While having a reputation for being drab, cold, and dark, November is in fact pregnant with curated wonder.

We are all savouring the views from the windows in our new kitchen and are looking forward to watching the snow swirl through the bare maples (after the corn is off!). I am still in the proverbial honeymoon phase in the kitchen. The drawers glide to open and glide to close, leaving no bits of wood shavings from scraping the frames. All the pulls are attached. And everything has its place with room to breathe (as one of my sisters has said).

I come down in the mornings and get my tea steeping while I put away the dishes that have drip-dried overnight. It is a simple pleasure. I can’t help but think about my girl self playing house.

In this past year, there has been a lot of moving. Our kitchen tear-down and rebuild had the qualities of a full out move. Two of our children did major moves. On a lesser scale, we had a small walk-in closet built upstairs. That set into motion a domino effect of moving bookshelves and organizing other closets and drawers. All of these moves, the big ones and the small ones, require sorting through stuff. Be it the kitchen, a closet, or bookcases, if you’re moving, all of it needs to handled and sorted. We have lived in our dear old home for close to forty years. When we moved here, all our belongings (other than furniture) sat on a patch of the dining room floor. After forty years of full living and raising our family here, we’ve spilled beyond that patch on the dining room floor. And, frankly, that’s ok. My reflections are less about stuff and more about sorting through it. Taking stock.

When it came time to move back into the kitchen, I tried hard to sort and cull. One of our girls helped me and having that second set of eyes and another opinion was helpful. Two devilled egg plates is likely one too many. How to choose which one goes and which ones stays? They’re both unique! Antique platters and french onion soup bowls with wicker basket holders were set on the to-go pile. I bought those soup bowls when we got married. Probably used them less than a handful of times. I stayed strong and sent them out the door. I do have a smidgen of regret about those soup bowls.

I had further chance to practice winnowing when going through my books. Thrift stores make it easy to build a personal library. However, it was time to ascertain what books had served their purpose for me and move them along for someone else’s use. How many old copies of the Bobbsey Twins series do I need to have on my shelf for the sake of nostalgia? Do I really need Lahaye’s book The Act of Marriage taking up space? Or parenting books? Even good reads that I didn’t see myself revisiting went out the door.

It was good to sift and sort and decide what still served a purpose and what didn’t. There was also this category of things/books that I may not ever use again but wasn’t ready to part with. Books that I read to the kids in our homeschool years have been thinned, but the ones that remain still fill a few shelves. I couldn’t part with a toaster cover made by an aunt long gone. It, along with other items like that, went into a storage tub in the basement.

I sat with my dear man, a husband in the truest, most original sense of the word, and we looked out across the ridges of the south field, recently shorn of its crop of corn. He said that he liked watching the corn grow there all summer, but that he’s glad to see it as it is now. Harvested. Things in their seasons. As The Teacher put it, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: … a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; … a time to keep, and a time to throw away” (Ecclesiastes 3). It can be hard, when you’ve experienced the richness of a season, to allow it to move on through fruition to its harvested/plucked up/thrown away or maybe simply to its natural end. Taking stock of my household wares was not unlike taking stock of my interior, albeit maybe less subtle. Belief systems and approaches to ways of thinking go through their own seasons and need reckoning. Relationships shift, needing open-handed acceptance and a resilience to tread new pathways. Bodies alter with age requiring a sorting of what physically remains beneficial and what needs to come to a natural close or be adapted.

And so, as the days of November, this brooding beauty of a month, wrap up, and we continue into a season of shortened days and long darkness, a season of waiting, a season of Advent, could there be an invitation to take stock? An invitation to let what is deep within simmer and shimmer to the surface? An invitation to rehome or let go? An invitation to see what is?