Upon a Sunny Day

My family lives in a crooked house.  I believe our house was built in 1910, making it just over 100 years old.  Apparently in 1910, levels were not utilized as they are in today’s construction methods.  Or, our house has shifted a bit.  Or, perhaps there are countless other reasons why our house is crooked, but I’m not an architect or engineer so I will not venture to get technical.

What I mean by crooked is, our walls are not straight [profound, right?].  If you look at the top of one, it might slope in a slight diagonal.  It’s nothing crazy like you might see in a Dr. Seuss house, but it’s not perfect.  Yet, the house is still standing after 100 + years, so I suppose a level is not an essential tool in building.

Crooked means bent or twisted out of shape or out of place, according to the dictionary I GOOGLED.

The song, Just Give Me a Reason, currently played on the radio, contains lyrics I can relate to:

We’re not broken just bent

I like that……we’re bent but we’re not broken.  Our house is crooked, but it’s still standing.  My relationship with my husband is not perfect….far from it.  But it’s not broken.  We’re bent.  We’re not perfect people.  We were not perfect when we met and got together.  And after 24+ years of knowing each other, we’re still lacking and in some ways, that will never change.  I’ve come to accept that.  We’re not completely, permanently fragmented, but we’re got our issues, our problems.  Some are because of who we are as individuals, some because of what happens when you mix the two of us together.

Isn’t it great to be bent, though?  If we weren’t, would we even be real?  My parents have a statue/memento/music player type thing. It was a gift years ago from my dad’s mom.  It’s about 8 inches tall, and has an old man and old lady figurine on it.  They’re slumped a bit, weary looking and aged.  Yet when I look at them it’s obvious they are comfortable and happy with each other.

As a college freshman, I got a D in drafting class.  My first D ever, as I was an A-B student in high school.  And it was difficult to stomach.  Honestly I was horrible at drafting and really couldn’t draw a straight line. [I wish an adviser had given me a simple test before enrolling me in this course!]  I, consequently, changed my major from Interior Design, realizing that drafting would be a large and most likely difficult part of my future if I continued on the path.  Years later, I look back and realize I was probably as, if not near, as creative as the rest of the students.  Yet I was more into the crooked, the not.so.straight.  I prefer the unbalanced, the abstract to the symmetrical.

I admit there are times I consider my marital and parenting situation and want to make great strides.  I feel like there’s much we could perfect, or at least improve on.  Yet, I go back to the crooked house analogy and I realize it’s alright to not have all the answers, to not be the model family.  We are who we are and the older I get, the more I realize that though there should be give and take, a complete alteration is not necessary or even desirable.  We continue to learn to live with the crookedness.