When I go into my mind's eye and think about my happiest childhood memories, they always seem to revolve around the kitchen. I have this idea that when my time comes and I'm ushered into the Hereafter, I'll find myself walking down the hallway of the very first house that I can remember, into the kitchen where I can see my mother standing at the sink, her back to me as she puts last night's dishes into the dishwasher, the sun from the window over the sink streaming around her. I can see this image from my tiny child's perspective as clearly as the room that I'm sitting in right now. I can see the dust motes floating magically through sunlit air like fairy glitter, I can see the old Harvest Gold refrigerator that my parents hated but never got around to replacing, I can see the wallpaper boarder with 80s country-style apple illustrations on it and the little built-in desk with the gigantic old calculator on it where mom paid the bills and balanced her checkbook. I can see her in my mind; in a moment she will turn to face me and smile, ask me if I had a good sleep and if I want some breakfast. I will say yes and go to the cabinet near the floor where the cereal is kept. I remember all of this and this will be my introduction into the next plane of existence.
There is another kitchen window that I remember with just as much fondness and comfort. It's the side window in my Grandma and Grandpa Anderson's house, the one that faces the driveway and that is just above the kitchen garbage can. The can is a marvel to me in that it has a swinging lid that will flip completely over if you push it hard enough. I'm not supposed to do that because germs but my grandparents just smile at me and wink when I do because they love having their grandchildren in town. The window has a ruffly valance framing it like something out of "I Love Lucy" and my Grandma has hung in it the plastic sun catchers that my brother and I painted for her. They're tacky and terrible, bearing images of psychedelically painted hummingbirds (we've never seen one so they're painted like parrots) and inscriptions like "#1 Grandma!" and "Luv You!" but my Grandma loves us so she thinks they're beautiful. And somehow, in my mind, there are always, always tomatoes ripening on the windowsill; tomatoes that have come from my Grandpa's immense garden plot in the backyard where he grows all kinds of things that we kids have only really ever seen in the grocery store. We marvel as he points out green beans, peas climbing stakes, currents on the most delicate little stems we've ever seen, sun-warmed raspberries on thorny bushes, carrots which never really seemed to come to much, and tomatoes. Always and always tomatoes. Early Girls with their pink fleshy skins, thick Beefsteaks, cherry tomatoes...always tomatoes. I remember being given a bunch of the vulnerable fruits to carry carefully in my gathered up shirt to my Grandma so that she can put them in the window to finish getting red before the birds and squirrels get them. I remember the way they taste at lunch when they've been cut into thick, juicy slices, the seeds slip-sliding out onto the plate on a river of sweet juice. We would sprinkle them with a little white sugar and oh, there's never been anything like that before or since. Surely winter and fall must have visited that kitchen and that garden but in my mind, I don't remember that. I can't see it. In my mind, that kitchen, with its pink walls and old green stove, is always glowing with summer sun. I can always see tomatoes in the window and smell the way the house smelled comfortably musty because there had never been air conditioning put in.
Those windows, that light, those smells - they're all so specific to a place and time and yet they're always right there next to me, in me. I feel like that's what I'm always trying to recreate no matter where I go or what home I'm trying to set up. I feel myself brightening when I'm looking at a house to rent and I see that it has a window over the sink. I feel my heart lift when I'm at the garden center and I see tomato starts for sale. I can feel a familiar ache in my chest when I bathe my babies in my kitchen sink the way that my mother used to wash my hair in ours. I remember her telling me about the baby bunnies that had been (unwisely) born under the great big tree in our backyard and how we could see them playing together, chasing each other around the base of the tree while she rinsed my hair with warm water. I feel loved and at home when I walk into a kitchen with old, cracked linoleum countertops and well-loved old appliances. I can smell the way my dad's old trench coat would smell of his cologne and the cold air when he would come through the garage door next to the refrigerator in the evening after work and pick my brother and I up in a giant hug.
In those moments, when those memories and their accompanying feelings come flooding back into my mind, those spaces feel sacred. I start to understand the meaning of the scriptures about the home being a temple, about the home being a sacred place to be cherished and protected. The everyday, small, simple things that happen in homes are so important, so sacred that we sometimes miss them for their very plainness. We don't realize how important those experiences are while they're happening because we're busy living the lives that we've been given. In the busyness of getting dinner on the table, we don't see that the spices that are filling the air from the stew in our slow cooker are acting like incense rising as an offering. In our haste to just get the floors clean already, we aren't seeing our labor as a sacrifice of gratitude to the One Who gave us the home in the first place and Whose Spirit dwells there. While pour over magazines and home renovation shows on television, wishing for this and that, we don't recognize that the longing for our homes to be beautiful comes from a place of wanting to give the best to the One who has given us our very best blessings - our families.
I think about my mother loading the dishwasher in the mornings as the sun caught her blond hair and how she was probably going over her to-do list in her mind and not realizing how beautiful and comforting she looked to me through my childish, sleepy eyes. I think about my grandmother putting those tomatoes on her windowsill the way that her mother and grandmother did before her and how that little ritual was actually an unconscious offering of worship and gratitude for the harvest of food. I think about the way those specific sights affected me and made me feel instantly loved, comforted, safe, awed, and as though everything was in order in my little world.
When framed through the lens of sacred ordinariness, those little moments that have been pressed into my psyche become something beautiful, something imbued with the wisdom of the ages, something that is part of the soul of the universe, infinite and eternal. If you think about the number of times that we do the everyday things that we do for and with our families in our homes versus the number of times that we attend worship services in a church or temple, the number of times that we read stories to our little ones on our laps versus the number of times that we read scriptures or devotionals, the number of loads of laundry that we do versus the number of times that we go down into the waters of baptism - when we tally up those numbers of the experiences of our lifetimes, it is clear. Our lives are spent in the pursuit of the worship of the daily, in the turning of everyday acts of service and sacrifice into an offering of thanks for the ability to do those things to the One Who has created us.
How does that realization change how we do things? How does that knowledge, that in washing windows and planting gardens and vacuuming carpets we are actually pouring ourselves out in sacrifice to the One who has given us the means and the world and the tools and the energy to do so, change how we view what we do? Does it? Or is part of the offering the fact that we simply do it because it needs to be done and we want to be steadfast in our duty?
I can see the sacred nature of my home because I can see the sacred natures of the homes in which I was raised. I can see my home as a temple to the One who gave me my family because I can see the way that those who served me created temples for me in which to thrive. I can see that the walls of the homes in which I've lived my life so far are saturated with the blood, sweat, and tears of the struggle to carve out something meaningful with the life that my Father in Heaven has given me. I see that because I can look back and see the work and the love, pain and loss, fear and courage that were all poured out into the homes of my parents and grandparents and how those things affected me as a child. I hope that my children feel those things too, on a subliminal level. I hope that I'm giving them memories that will help them to frame feelings of sacredness so that when they encounter it outside of their homes, they recognize it for what it is. I hope that I am being mindful of my duties and everyday acts of service to those I love so that when they encounter callings on their own lives, they know what it is to serve and they have the spiritual reserve to do so.
I want my own windows to be adorned with tomatoes from my garden, I want there to be light streaming in while I load my dishwasher. I want my children to see me at work folding laundry and tilling soil and washing windows. I want to wear an apron as proudly as I wear my Sunday best. I want the food on my table to be an offering on an altar. I want my home to truly be a temple and for the Spirit to be given space to teach, nourish, and bless us there because It has been made welcome by a daily air of service and love.
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