Bucket Lists, Berries, and Windows

Teenage dreams and bucket lists.

When I was a teenager, one of my best friends, my sister, and I all decided to make bucket lists. I’m not sure who came up with the idea, but it was a fun way to spend the evening. We had all kinds of things on our lists from “Get married” and “Have lots of babies” to “Bake a beautiful pie crust” and “Learn to raise one eyebrow higher than the other” (which, evidently, is not something you can learn… you either can or you can’t).

As time went on I kept up with that list, checking things off periodically. To begin with, I intentionally did things on my list just so I could check them off, but eventually it got tucked away somewhere and forgotten about. I hadn’t thought much about it recently until we were at our new house one afternoon.

I promise this blog isn’t always going to be about plants.

If you read my previous post you will know that I am a terrible gardener. If that wasn’t enough, I also can’t identify most plants… considering our retail store once sold plants, you’d think I’d be better at this. I have been making more attempts to learn as my kids are getting older, but it doesn’t come easily to me and my knowledge is still very limited.

This means that I wasn’t sure what plants were on the four acres we purchased. I had hopes of doing a little more research and incorporating more nature study into our homeschool once we started exploring more, but I honestly had no idea.

Since we’ve been self-quarantined for a few weeks now and our current yard is so small, we’ve been driving out to our new place to get some fresh air. Well one day Jack texted me while he was working to let me know that we had blueberry bushes on our property.

I was ecstatic!

You see, on the bucket list I made almost a decade ago I had written, “Have a berry garden.” Despite my lack of plant knowledge, I LOVE berries! I may have been going a little stir crazy, but I could not wait to drive out to our new place and see them for myself so as soon as Jack got home we hopped in the car and went to check it out!

The more we walked, the more blueberries we found. I found myself remembering those silly dreams that I had forgotten about and thanking God for providing joy in what seemed like such a miniscule detail in the grand scheme of things.

But He didn’t stop there.

I was thrilled with the blueberries. If that’s all He had given us, I would’ve been thrilled and never given it another thought. However, as He usually does, God had even more in store for me. Not only do we have blueberries, we also found tons of blackberries, mulberries, some kind of grape vine, and possibly elderberries! God gave me my berry garden!

I know that to almost anyone else, being so excited about berry plants is completely ridiculous and nothing that you would thank God for. If circumstances were different I probably wouldn’t have thought much about it, but He knew I needed this. This was the reminder I needed that He cares about even the smallest details of our lives.

It’s been a long year… oh wait, it’s not even been a whole month.

This social distancing has been hard. I could handle the isolation better if it didn’t come with the fear and worry of my family getting sick. I’ve loved having less appointments and being home more than we were last year, but I miss the rest of my family, fellowshipping with other believers, and running to the dollar store by myself so I can wander around with no real purpose except to avoid being touched for a minimum of fifteen minutes…. these kiddos of mine have no concept of what social distancing is!

We’ve also been working on demo at the new place for two months. I knew this wasn’t going to be a quick process since they can only working on the weekends, but I was starting to get frustrated that it was taking so long to feel like we were making progress.

Between the self-quarantine and painfully slow renovation timeline, my anxiety has been oscillating between “God’s got this” and “I’ve gone completely crazy!” I know He cares, but sometimes I need the reminder.

Sometimes a reminder is just what He gives.

Last week God gave our family so much joy when we found the plethora of berries in our yard, reminding me of silly teenage dreams and reigniting those dreams into new memories just waiting to be made with my family.

Last week also marked the end of the demolition. After eight long weekends of hard, nasty work, the house is ready to start putting back together! The first new thing to go into the house was windows!

The windows are what I fell in love with.

The very first time we walked into this house, I fell in love with the windows! The natural light and how open the rooms felt, even before they took out the walls, made my heart swoon. So the fact that windows were the first new thing to go into the house felt a little bit like God whispering to me, “Hey, I see you and I’ve still got this.”

Now that the windows are in and the demo is done, it’s time to start on the wiring, plumbing, and new walls. It’ll still take a while to finish the house, but it’s finally heading in the right direction! While the men are hard at work, I’ll be over here dreaming of blueberry pies and looking for my bucket list.

What about you? How has this weird time of social distancing and quarantine changed your perspective? What have you become more thankful for during this time?