Our Recycled Days

Yesterday, Jesse came downstairs with a book he received for Christmas about making Lego movies. I think it’s the first time he opened it.

Jesse’s newfound interest became Ezra’s, and when the book-share didn’t work, Ezra contented himself with the mish-mash Lego bin that’s always under the radio cabinet but rarely explored.

Tommy has been re-reading the Berenstain Bears’ In the Dark on repeat for the last week. Usually he brings it to me to monologue in his mix of Tommy-isms punctuated with key words from the text, but yesterday as I was drifting into a nap, he plopped next to me and read the story, verbatim.

When the boys came home from school in March, they came with all of their stuff – an alarming pile of pencils, erasers, notebooks, glue sticks, and a thick stack of worksheets. I didn’t want to throw away what I could recycle, and I didn’t want to recycle what I could re-purpose. From March until now, every journal entry, Bible study note, and blog has started on the blank backs of these sheets that I three-hole punched and put in a yellow binder.

Today’s news isn’t good. It’s a confluence of bad and spikes. And yet, our family’s days feel recycled. Restricted.

Matt and I moved to Oxford 10 years ago under pressed circumstances, and one of my biggest regrets from this time was the scarcity mindset I adopted. I felt my lack keenly and thought “more” was the answer. It became an undercurrent that kept me from satisfaction, and though I now see the richness of then I missed a lot at the time by insisting on lack.

These recycled days could go the same way. There’s nothing to differentiate a Monday from a Tuesday, and the reports tempt me to think these days can’t be anything other than bad at worst and boring at best. Maybe I should hold my breath until August … when the kids go back? November … when the elections happen? 2021 … when we have a vaccine?

I’m 10 years older and a smidgen wiser than when we returned to Oxford. I know how to restore a past regret by broadening how I see the days now – not as a cheery overlay but in recognition of an adjacent reality.

I look out my house windows and see kids playing all day long. In past summers, our neighborhood was quiet. All the kids were at summer camp.

I see my boys engaging (and fighting) because they can’t get a break from one another. They’re finally figuring it out.

I see reading, re-reading, and legitimate first-time reading.

I see Matt firing up the charcoal grill most nights because we have time most nights for dinners like that.

I see time and how it stretches long at the start of the day, but then it’s somehow 8:30, and I’m calling the boys to park their hoverboards, bikes, and scooters to come to bed.

I see how tomorrow will be more of the same, a basic recycle of today. And I see sameness in a different way – how it begets tedium, but also patience and ingenuity.

Yesterday, my sister’s family arrived from across the country in a car stacked with provisions for the drive and the next two weeks. Very Steinback. Before I said good night to my niece, she was telling me about the Cops & Robbers game Jesse and her had developed in the twilight. The trampoline plays a key role, it seems. Yesterday, it was same ole’. Today, it has new life. Recycled.