Until It's Gone.

Tonight I made supper.  A quick seared pork loin, with a red wine reduction.  As I was searing the pork, because you know, that's when all the deep thoughts happen, I thought about how it had been the first time in over a month that I had done something so normal.  I had started to forget what the routine of supper time was; or what it even felt like to come home from work and school and have time to make a meal.  I even had the guilty thought that I didn't have time to be making supper. I had papers to file, issues to resolve and a mother who was changing hospital rooms after 6+ weeks in the ICU without me there.  But rest assured, I stopped myself from completing those thoughts.   And then I realized, once more, how much we take for granted when life is just normal.

I've had my reality checked on this before, the last four years have felt like one big reality check.  But this time it felt more profound, probably because I've been living in a split world, 700 miles apart, for 47(ish) days.

I remember when my step dad was very ill, in the ICU at a VA hospital across the street from where my mom is now, he had his second open heart surgery in only a few months the day after Christmas.  We traveled from South Dakota to Columbia, Missouri, on Christmas Day.  We struggled to find gas stations open, and topped the day with a hamburger dinner at the Waffle House; where a fellow patron explained her newest weight loss plan consisted of only eating Waffle House hamburgers.  (Don't get me wrong, we were grateful Waffle House was open Christmas Day night, but only eating their burgers feels like a sentence to purgatory if you ask me.)  That memory is so vivid for me, because we found the Waffle House open after searching for a hot meal.  Any meal would've worked, we were just tired of chips, licorice and beef jerky.  I remember laughing with my husband at the fact that we suddenly found Waffle House so appealing.  But how many Christmas Days had I taken for granted?  How many years had I gone to Christmas Eve service, woke up Christmas Day to a tree overflowing with presents and leisurely had brunch or a tasty prime rib dinner?  I'm going to say about 34 years of them.  And after that Christmas things didn't go back to how they were - but certainly we had family, love, gifts and lots of food.  We went back to celebrating holidays, back to fixing supper and having morning coffee.

Four years and what feels like a life time have passed since the Waffle House Christmas dinner.  And now I'm struck with the same life lesson.  People are fragile, life is fleeting and normalcy is one of life's best things.  And we take it for granted.  I take it for granted.  I keep hoping for something exciting to happen.  I keep telling myself that the normal of my life is just until something better happens to me.  We all do this.  No one wants to say that their life is "boring" and it's rare to hear someone say, "I love my routine day.  I crave the run of the mill."  I'm going to tell you, I do and you should.  Normal days, we should celebrate those as much as we do an achievement, holiday or birthday, because  someday that normal won't be there anymore.  Life happens and it all changes in the snap of a finger.  It sounds cliche, I know, but it's not.  Love your routine.  Embrace you life.  Live to be the exception and never underestimate the deep, thought provoking power of a pork loin in a red wine reduction.