A Time to Organize
Monday, January 29, 2007
It was one of those days that Rose had Spanish from nine till ten and then worked from eleven till four. So Collette decided that it was high time she begin organizing all of the “things” she and OLeif had collected over the past two and a half years, in preparation for the move.
Going on eleven, Carrie and Rose knocked at the door, with Carrie’s secret knock.
“For you,” Carrie held out a covered Styrofoam cup of sweet apple cider.
They had dropped by to kill some time before Rose had to be at work. This time, Collette didn’t mind letting someone besides her or OLeif into the pig-pen, as the mess could more easily be associated with moving. It occurred to her that Carrie and Rose were only the fourth and fifth persons to have visited their apartment in perhaps the last eight months or so.
Before they left, Carrie and Rose loaded up on a pile of things Collette was either going to give away or donate to the rummage sale. Carrie took the red paint-stamped curtains to use for the madrigal dinner. And between her and Rose, they took back a box of various glass bottles, a Chinese tea set, a clown marionette, ribbons, beads, and medallions. One step towards less “things” for the house, for which OLeif would be quite grateful.
It was time to revert to more of a Quaker living-style. Of course, with the bright colors they were planning to paint the walls of the house (provided all went as planned), it would look nothing like a Quaker house.
Meanwhile, Carrie reported that she was having over Elizabeth, Lucia, and Queens for a bit of a party that day and then they would leave Rose a quiet house to study, while they went off to shop. Joe had already vowed to vacate the premises while they were all present. Joe sometimes got a little scared around the gaggles of girls that Carrie occasionally entertained at the house. Rose had also already tried for an escape route before she found out that she would be at work while the girls were over for the party.
And Dad, Mom, and the kids had called in to the house the night before. They had made it in safely and were prepared to begin a great day of fun starting Monday morning.
“I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over…”
– pp.106-107, The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis