pardon my sawdust

So, the promise of a brighter day has arrived.

Now don’t get excited. I haven’t met a man or cured world hunger or found a reason for Paris Hilton’s celebrity.

No, instead, the pungent smelling workman of the apocalypse who are building the closet for our new washer and dryer–for which we will each be paying $25 extra a month for the privilege (but let’s admit it, doing your laundry in your underwear, if necessary, and not needing 4000 quarters or a car to do so is pretty darn worth it)–arrived this morning.

I was by myself.   They came, they said I had to move everything out of the dining room (including a rather large table, thankyouverymuch) and off the counters and blah blah blah.  Unexpected to say the least, especially when I was on my way to my Institute class.

Thanks for the warning, apartment building office staff who couldn’t possibly be any more useless if you tried.  Thanks very much.

So they came, they framed a ginormous closet that sticks out at least a few inches from the existing wall (sweet!  more things for me run into!), they cut off the breakfast bar part of our counter, they moved the ceiling fan, they cut holes into the walls.

And they left sawdust EVERYWHERE.

By everywhere, I do not wax hyperbolic (is that RIGHT?).  I really do mean everywhere.

On the dishes in the sink–oh, yes, clean dishes–that were six feet away.  On the couches and fluffy lovely pillows across the room that had to be like twelve feet away.  Little pieces of laminate (why did I want to spell that Lamanites? Mormon humor…sorry.) are now embedded in everything we own, because apparently it’s impossible to NOT make it fly everywhere.  My roommate and I spent quite a while recovering–sweeping, vacuuming, cleaning the kitchen.  We were not amused.

(And if I find any of this in my sheets tonight, in my made bed in the bedroom that had the door shut, I might just lose my mind.  Fair warning.)

But at the same time as all of this angst and annoyance, I am excited. I am glad to finally see progress being made towards something that will be such a blessing. I am glad that what I thought was going to take so much longer isn’t, in fact, as far into the future as I thought it might be.

It’s all so very hopeful.

I have now decided something.  My life is one big construction zone.

(Come on. You knew I would go for the analogy.)

It’s messy–boy howdy, is it messy.  Full of potholes and jutting out walls and nails that haven’t quite been hammered in and smoothed out, that snag your dress as you walk by or scratch you just a little if you get too close.  Constantly in a state of upheaval, renovation, redecoration, my world seems more chaos than constant lately, and at times I’m never quite sure where I stand.

Who’s actually IN my life to stay?  What should I be doing? Am I doing it right? What’s just the distraction and what’s the real focus?

It’s all so very noisy and it all seems so very undone.

But it’s hopeful.  Even in the midst of burst pipes or splintered two-by-fours, my life is hopeful.

I am building something awesome.

If it’s a little wonky at times, I trust that there is Someone who can fix it.

If it’s a little different than I expected or planned, usually, if I just step back for a moment, I end up liking it quite a bit more than the version that I had planned.

And it’s beautiful.

It’s BEAUTIFUL.

Even if is a mess.

It’s my beautiful mess–and I love it. And I’m not sure I’d have it any other way.