Reclaimed and Repurposed

It’s been a long week.

And so it’s midnight before I begin to stir chickpea flour into melted ghee, finely chop macadamia nuts and mix with coconut into peaked egg whites, form chocolate truffles and roll in chocolate sprinkles.

While the rest of the house sleeps.

Wash, mix, mold, bake, scrape, taste, lick.

I’m making international desserts to serve at our Compassion sponsorship table for our church’s ministry expo.

At 3 a.m, I finally fall into bed. The cleanup can wait.

I miss my Sunday morning yard time, save for 30 seconds standing outside and breathing deep.

By evening I’m desperate. I sink into a rocker on the front porch where the light has grown too dim to read or write. The tree in front of me wears a golden miniskirt. The hum of traffic is faint, and I still hear summer night sounds.

I don’t know the difference between peepers or crickets or birds past bedtime. But the sounds sooth.

In front of me and slightly to the north sits the skinning stone. Dennis says he was told that Indians stretched animal hide over it to scrape any leftover meat before drying the skins. It sat on the farm for years.

Now it’s part of the hedge that protects our well pipe thingie from being bonked by a car bumper.

Reclaimed and repurposed.

To my right is a bowl salvaged from the broken pedestal of a real birdbath and purchased for a small price. It sits atop a milk funnel that sits atop a strainer that sits atop a milk can. Dennis says before modern milking parlors, a machine that looked like an oversized teapot was hooked up to the cow. His dad poured the collected milk through the funnel. The strainer caught any stray dirt or straw, and then his dad set the can in a tank of cooled water. The milkman came daily to pick up the cans and take them to the dairy.

Now it provides a base for birds to bathe and drink.

Reclaimed and repurposed.

To my left is an old forge blower. Dennis says the farm once had its own blacksmith shop. The hose was attached to the fire pot and the handle cranked to provide draft. They used to shoe their own horses.

Now it provides decoration for my yard and celebration of family roots.

Reclaimed and repurposed.

Symbols of a past that marriage grafted me into, giving me a place in a long heritage of men and women who lived close to the land. And it strikes me that I have that in my own history as well.

Maybe in a sense I’m kind of like a horseshoe, broken and molded, heated and hammered, trailing the U legs now of two family pasts (technically four) as I move forward into the future. (Perhaps it’s fitting that I grew up on a lake–Horseshoe Lake.)

“You’re tired,” I say out loud to my self. “Now you’re being goofy.”

But maybe.

I envision myself nailed to the feet of my Savior.

Reclaimed and repurposed.

Celebrating On, In and Around Mondays with L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone.