Gods: Those in the kitchen (and, yes, those at the Shell station)

The none too subtle point of my earlier post today was that adventure needn't carry us far at all, though they certainly may, and have, in my life as well. But, boundaries mark and crisscross us daily, inviting/invoking the possibilities for Grace at all turns.

The three of us have begun a new adventure in a home we recently purchased - our first as a family, my fourth as a wanderer. It is a 42-year-old house, and we are its second owners. It feels like a gift to us in so many ways, a beautiful home tucked beneath beautiful trees in front and back, and beds lovingly gardened by the 93-year-old woman who sold it to us, to begin her new journey with family in North Carolina.

I mowed the yard for the first time this afternoon, under a Texas-blue sky, with a lovely fall breeze. Carved a couple of pumpkins for Walden and his visiting amigo, and then puttered outside. I do not putter, and of late in drought-ridden Texas, I do not "outside." But outside I did today, and puttered, and were a truce possible with the rainy day mosquitoes, I would be hammocking my way through these lazy afternoons.

But, none of these things, and none of the predictable hoopla that attends the buying of and moving into a house truly felt like this house had moved inside my skin. That came this evening with a fifteen-second pirouette from one side of the kitchen to the other to fetch a water glass from the cabinet behind me. The move was so fluid and felt like something I had been doing for years in this kitchen and would continue to do for many years to come. Something so simple, filled with history flooding.

I find that Grace falls on me like this quite often. Unmistakable steppings out of and steppings through that are "nothing more" than the simplest of living prayers. As I've said before, Yemaya was always wont to visit me when I least expected it, most often while staring off into a big blue Austin sky, while pumping gas at the Shell station at the corner of South Congress and Riverside Drive, blessing me with life out of time, just as today's kitchen goddess did the same in her sock feet on the tile of this casita in Tres Leches.