Beautiful and Tiny Hope

When I think about the future, like so many 20/30 something’s, I just want to take a nap. The steps we took were empty promises and now we are left standing alone without prospects or hope of loving our jobs. We take what we can get and are grateful. Part time, low wage, no benefits, at least I have a job, a reason to get up in the morning. This is more than a lot of our peers have at the moment. Loving what we do is a luxury we cannot afford at the moment and those lucky enough to love what they do ( like me) end up living in our parents basement buying lottery tickets and hoping for co-workers to retire. So when I think about the future I cannot see anything beyond tomorrow.

Save this one oh so tiny, beautiful and simple hope.

I have a very small image in my head. It’s a moment, a simple snapshot of something I want. There is a certain kind of light to it, early morning, hazy cool but bright. Bright grey. It is quite save for the occasional bird, not the chirpy twitter pated bush birds that tweet en masse, but a lower lonely bird who calls out every few minutes just to remind himself he can. I am inside, but only a little. The windows are wide and open and even the walls feel like glass on this open morning. Maybe it is the monochromatic nature of the clean kitchen I am in but the early soft colors of a dewy morning match the subtle hues of my surroundings.

I am sitting, one foot dangling to the ground the other perched on a chair. The chair is one of many mismatched wooden chairs surrounding a rusting and unfinished looking raw wood dining room table. This is my kitchen. There are flowers, peonies, purple and pink, in a glass jar in the middle of the table. There is an open window over the large white kitchen sink, filled with drying dishes. There is a humming refrigerator covered with family photos and poems. Everything in the kitchen matches in the weir d way that everything I own kind of matches.

There is steam rising from my first cup of coffee. There is a newspaper pulled apart draped over the table and my dangling leg. I am bent to it reading. I am in a white slip, with a pinkish cardigan and mismatched socks. My hair is in my perpetual messy bun.

The stairs to the second floor make up one wall of the kitchen. At the bottom of the stairs you can walk directly out a door to the yard or turn and be facing the open layout of the ground floor. Since I am sitting and it is quite and the stairs are right there I can hear people moving around up stairs. I am awake first and downstairs reading. Everyone else is just getting ready to bound down the stairs and start their morning. I am alone in the way I love being alone, knowing it won’t be for long and I should savor it quickly. I am alone in my kitchen, in my house, with my family about to come downstairs, it is a perfect tiny moment, it is beautiful and it is ordinary.

When someone asks me about my plans or my hopes for the future this is what I see. It is an image I have accidentally cultivated for a few years now. It is what I inhabit in my tiny moments of solitude and serenity. It is probably due to spending too much time on Pinterest. But it isn’t the beauty of the kitchen that makes it a perfect moment (though it helps) its knowing that I will have a routine that will be ordinary that I can only dream of now. A routine with stolen moments of coffee and solitude and a family waiting to start their day.