Blemish

Our house was built in 1984, interestingly enough, that was the year my husband and I met, in Austin, Texas while in graduate school. The house is starting to show some wrinkles, and seems to need more maintenance on an exponential scale, but as frustrating as it can be to realize it will from here on out need more repainting, re-flooring, re- upholstering, re- cabineting, I love its imperfections. The other night I came into the kitchen for a glass of water and noticed the small pull out cutting board that has scuff marks still from the previous owners who built the house. They were a Vietnamese couple who had met in a refugee camp in Vietnam in 1976, and had immigrated to Washington State. 1976 happened to be the year I left Belgium at the age of 19 to be a foreign exchange student in Dallas, Texas for a year. I felt a kinship with the marks left that always reminded me of the family who came across so very determinedly. To make another country your own is never evident or easy, I know that after having lived in the US now for 39 years, but this husband and wife came here with nothing but the desire to make a go of a new life and try and leave the scars of war and death and loss behind. The scuff marks on the humble cutting board are a nice reminder to be grateful, to be focused, to believe and forge ahead the way they did. They were selling the house we have lived in now for 25 years, and were moving to a bigger house with their son and daughter, finding the current house too small and too modest. They were moving up in the world. We have stayed in the same house, and I am glad. In a small house you have to get along, in a big house it is too easy to avoid each other. My parents had a big house and it was not a happy place. Our house in comparison feels like a cozy country cottage, and it is perfect for the lessons my heart has had to learn, about the importance of family, integrity, kindness, devotion,sincerity. Small is good. I hope the Vietnamese family found happiness in their bigger house. We ran into them in town a number of years later, and they were very surprised we were still living in their small house. They would be even more surprised to learn that 25 years later we are still there. The thought makes me smile. The house we bought from them is home, completely and solidly, it is where my heart grew roots and healed. It is where my son was raised from the day he was born, it is where we made great friends and neighbours, where many a dog and cat got a second chance at love and a home, where my heart finds peace among the many flowers of our backyard, where we swim, we have BBQ.s and roast marshmallows and make 's mores in our fire pit. It is where we dream, love, sleep, laugh, cry, eat, sit by our fireplace in winter. It is where we feel safe, loved, secure. The blemish in the cutting board like many a piece of wisdom seems unappealing at first. Until you realize it holds a nugget of precious importance about happiness and how it thrives in grateful, kind hearts that stay focused on the treasures of the spirit. The glitter of a forever greedy mind would be annoyed at the imperfection the scarred wood of the kitchen cutting board would seem to imply. Like a piece of raiku pottery where a crack is revered and filled with gold to show the beauty of the imperfection, the scarred cutting board is precious to me, because if gold is a treasure, so is the importance of a family lovingly living life each day, and in the process leaving their mark, the mark that says, we were here, as you are here now, love one another's imperfections in a perfect way. The blemished cutting board is a message I never get tired of.