Anniversary gift from the past is still rest in the chaos

Six years ago this month, my parents gifted John and I a wooden bowl as a wedding gift. It had been carved out of one of the eight walnut trees in the backyard I had grown up in, after they decided  to cull the trees on the orchard our house had been built on back in the 70s. 

In the last few years the walnut bowl has lived in different spots around our home in Philipsburg. I haven't known exactly how to make use of it. Its ridges are as rough as the limbs my brother and I built tree forts on; it is wide, but shallow, not really made to be a bowl for food. Maybe jewelery, I thought once, but never used it for that purpose either.

Over the years I started putting items in the bowl that brought me happiness when I looked at them. Shells from beaches I had loved in New Zealand, where my father was born, and where I had spent most of my 20s and 30s. Cones from the tree grove on the ocean cliffs at the end of the California street my grandparents had raised my mother and her two sisters, and where my cousins and I played when we were little. A single sprig of eucalyptus from the table centerpieces at our barn wedding. Pieces of pine branches from our backyard. But the bowl still got placed on shelves that were obstructed or out of view. It was an after-thought bowl.

Then sometime during this fall,  I began moving furniture around to do a deeper clean of our house. I was starting to learn two crucial things about myself and about parenting two toddlers in general. For one, I crave order. Maybe I don't always have the motivation to put this into action. But the sight of our jackets and scarves being hung neatly on the coat rack, next to all of our boots - large to tiny - lined up with the toe facing outward, always makes me feel peaceful. I'm learning that I don't need to feel silly about that.

Secondly, parenting two toddlers is intense. The waves of emotions I ride with Jessie, 3, and Eliza, 22 months, each day right now - elation and mountain-top joy at a favorite song playing on the stereo, and five minutes later, heartbreaking howls if a fork is taken out of sticky hands - can leave me glassy-eyed by lunch.  The most powerful and quickest way I've found to get my "me" back each day, is to sit in my favorite chair in a clean and tidy house, floors swept and mopped, laundry going in the back room, books and toys put away, with a cup of tea in hand. I can look around the room at all the photos and momentos that bring me joy, with the pines outside our window moving in the wind, the chimes my mother-in-law gave us after our daughter was born, ringing softly.

Sometimes I get an hour and a half of this. Sometimes I get 20 minutes. But in rearranging furniture, I ended up moving a coffee table back to the center of the living room and placing the walnut wood bowl on it at an angle. When I sit and stare off, sometimes reading, sometimes just laying the open book across my knee to let my mind wander, I rely on having that curved bowl in my view. In my worst, most resentful moods, it centers me and brings me back to what I have. 

I call it my gratitude bowl now. I don't want it to be out of view or an afterthought anymore.

Maybe because it reminds me that being thankful in this space, in this moment, especially in this year with each curveball coming at us, demanding resilience and renewal - is a necessary practice. 

Gwyneth Hyndman is the interim editor of the Seeley Swan Pathfinder. She is based in Philipsburg.