Today I unpacked 15 large heavy boxes of kitchen stuff. I carried each box the roughly 100 feet from my son’s room to my kitchen and began slicing one box after the other reuniting with the belongings which have been packed away for the last two months. It roughly resembles the feeling of moving into a new house, only it’s the same house with a slightly different kitchen. Similar to a start of a new school year but in the same school. It’s a life shuffle I didn’t ask for but am abiding, nonetheless.

Meeting up with my long-lost things is an interesting phenomenon. Hello, Thing I forgot I had or Thing I thought I threw away or Thing I missed so desperately (apple peeler). Yet another blatant metaphor for life slapping my face. We’re going on three months of construction and just when I thought I wrote the last word on it when I discovered the final “reason for it all,” another day brings with it a fresh perspective. When you take an initial catalyst (the flood) and add time and distance, it becomes poignant, rather than dramatic; a bump in the road, rather than a life upheaval.

The new kitchen cabinets are in the same location and my appliances are silver instead of white. I’m sure within a couple of months I will get so accustomed to the new kitchen I won’t ever remember a time before it (like a new baby). I blame the same hormones our bodies secrete after childbirth forcing us to forget the pain and arduous labor it entails to deliver a human. This biological magic is designed to keep us procreating, designed to make us say, “Thank you, sir, can I have another?” after we go through the worst pain in our lives. After a house renovation, I’m convinced those similar hormones are secreted to make us forget the frustrating and difficult days where nothing seemed to go right. Indicative of the human condition that it takes something bad to appreciate the daily minutia of goodness.