Messy houses and happy hearts — Life at Lancaster Land

It was 5:30 on Tuesday night. I was doing what I’m usually doing these days on 5:30 on most nights, making dinner and drinking a glass of wine.

I had spent a rushed ten minutes before this just picking up stuff. Kid stuff, stuff from the day, and surrounding me was even more stuff that needed picked up and the fact that I probably wasn’t going to get to it until after the kids went to bed was weighing heavily.

There’s a mess around me, always. And let me be vulnerable for a minute - it drives me pretty crazy.

So there I am, hands deep in batter (we were breading fish for some tacos), when Elsie dances in, opens the pantry and starts pulling cans and jars and boxes of pasta out, placing it not-so-neatly on the floor.

Are you kidding me, child. Another mess.

Mom, let’s organize the cabinet! Let’s do it together!

There’s only so much time in the day, and we can choose to focus, to fester, on the messes that surround us - the chaos and uncomfortable. Regardless of who we are or what our families look like or who we live with, the world is thick with chaos and it’s not going anywhere, anytime soon. And in my house, although I want to clean it up and put it away, it’s all important too - the baby bouncers, Barbie dream houses, bins of diapers and wipes. It all tells a story.

It’s telling us that this is a house well lived in, messy as it may be, and above all, I know that hearts around here are happy. I keep reminding myself that all too soon, I’ll be boxing it up and I’ll miss that baby jumper that hangs in the doorway, even though I’m constantly annoyed by having to push it out of the way as I pass through right now. One day, I’ll be bored of actually using my dining room table for actual dining because today, there’s a slot-car track taking up most of the space.

Time is so weird. Perspective is so important.

If you know me and you know my family and especially have ever been to Lancaster Land, you know that my husband, Joey, has an undisclosed number of motorcycles in his shop. There’s projects everywhere. You’ll find he’s controlling the chaos pretty well, but to an untrained eye, it’s a lot. You’ll find half-built bikes and torn apart engines and from floor to ceiling, you’ll find the space is littered with trophies and helmets and stuff, so much other stuff.

One of the big projects on his list that just never leaves the list is clean up the shop, organize the shop. But, instead of spending time doing these two things, he spends time building and creating and making memories and I just love that about him. He presses pause on the things he feels like he should be doing sometimes because the outcome of placing energy where he wants to place it creates such a better outcome. So, that shop stays messy. That’s okay.

We can’t always do this, because, you know - life, but we should pick these battles carefully. I read a quote from author Nora Barnes once, about juggling and having a lot of balls in the air at the same time. And I think about this A LOT. She was asked how she keeps them all in the air. And I’m paraphrasing, but essentially, she said she doesn’t. She said that some are glass and some are plastic and it’s important to know which are which and to keep the right ones from dropping.

The shop is a plastic ball. Finishing making the fish tacos on time are a plastic ball. Being there for our loved ones is glass, so fragile and so we need to really take care of that one. On this day, rearranging the pantry was a glass ball.

I washed my hands, quickly dried them on my jeans and sat down next to Elsie on the kitchen floor. We grabbed the kidney beans and the diced tomatoes and the macaroni noodles off the shelf and sat it on the floor just to be reorganized and put back again. We did this together. Because to her, it’s not a mess, it’s a memory and if we’re being honest, it’s a memory for me too.