My daughter and her boyfriend came to visit and we spent the entire afternoon together. A year ago, or even less, I would have planned a feast with some of their favorite foods, but it was kind of spur of the moment and all I had was a fridge full of vegetables, so I decided to feed us how I eat today.

I laid a stack of red cloth napkins on the giant, wooden table and homemade hummus is on a platter with sliced veggies. They liked how I had moved the table to the middle of the house which was designed for a den and we sat among pretty little things that collectively make up my world. My daughter studied items on the table, asking what some of them were, but she was blown away by the foldable, Jane Austen scissors used while making scarves.

My daughter helped me pull the feast together and it drenched my heart standing in the kitchen with her again. We made roasted Heirloom carrots on a bed of farro, drizzled with Tahini dressing and the Kale and Quinoa salad shown in the previous post. She set the table using our Vintage, fine China plates, on woven pewter place mats and came back to the kitchen to help get the food plated, but while we were out of sight, Josie, her boyfriend, folded the napkins into roses!

What 20 something year old guy does that? One who grew up with 7 sisters. Obviously, he’s a keeper!

Josie is always in charge of cleaning the dishes, but as he was washing them, both sides of the sink stopped up. I knew they had been slow in draining and had poured liquid plumber down the drain a couple of times this year, but this was new. The two of them had many ideas on how to fix it, but I plunged most of the water away to resume our visit. I didn’t want fixing a clogged sink to take away any time.

The next day both sinks were still clogged, but I knew what needed to be done. I pulled everything out from under the sink and went in search of my bucket. The bucket was too tall to fit underneath the pipes, so I grabbed a large bowl instead. Unscrewing the U-shaped pipe from both ends of the plumbing I held my breath while nastiness gushed into the bowl below. The U-shaped pipe was completely clogged with gunk.

It made me wonder how many years had passed since this pipe had been removed? Decades would be my guess and upon further inspection, I saw something protruding from the gunk, so I reached in to pull it out to find it was a popsicle stick! Someone had stuck a popsicle stick down the drain of one of the sinks, but over time it had collected particles of debris to create a dam effect and it was completely clogged.

A simple act performed years ago impacted the functionality of both sinks today. Of course, it took a long time to get to this point, but after cleaning out the pipe, I’m amazed how fast the sinks drain and they’ve never flowed like this before!

When there’s no flow, something is in the way. I don’t know about you, but I’ve mastered standing in my own way and even though this stick was disgusting, it was easily removed. Forgiveness of choices made by our previous selves and others brings us into the life we have today and we honor our future selves by choosing to let life flow.