The Bearded One and I live in a fairly small house. I’ve mentioned this before. It’s not our dream home, but it’s mostly okay for now. One issue we have, though, is a lack of cupboard space in the kitchen. Well, storage space is lacking in the whole house, really, except in the basement. A few years ago I had the bright idea that we should put up a couple of shelves in the hallway off the kitchen to use as a pantry, so I found some shelf brackets on sale and bought some wood to put on them for shelves. It didn’t look great, but it was functional. I always meant to go back and paint the shelves, or put something up around them so everything wasn’t visible all the time, or just do something better with the space. I even cut a hole in the wall below the shelves, thinking I could put a pantry in there because it was the space under the stairs that go up to our little half story, until I realized it might be the only wall in this wonky old house that has studs that have the standard 16″ on center spacing, making it a bit of a tight squeeze to get into, and the area under the stairs was too short to stand up in. I still plan to finish the hole off with a little door and use it as some kind of storage, though. I just need to get around to it.
Anyway, I took Marty out for her bedtime stroll tonight, and when we came back inside there were some boxes scattered on the kitchen floor that definitely hadn’t been there when we’d gone out a few minutes earlier. I went to investigate, and one of the shelves in that hallway had fallen. There were boxes of cereal, granola bars, and crackers, bags of chips and pretzels, and a couple of pitchers that weren’t currently in use, among other things, all over the floor of the hallway, with the wooden shelf on top of it all. I looked at the brackets, and it appears that we must not have gotten one of them screwed into a stud. Whoops. Nothing seems to have broken too badly, or made much of a real mess. It’s mostly just a bunch of boxes that need to be picked up and relocated, which I’ll do momentarily. But nothing was even added to that shelf recently, so it seemed weird that it just happened.
But it got me to pondering…even when we think we’re supported and doing a good job of keeping it all together, sometimes the weight of life just becomes too much to bear and we fall, with everything we’re trying to do toppling along with us. And sometimes that happens without warning–we might be going along feeling like we’re doing okay, when all of a sudden, even without adding something else to our plates, it’s just too much. This seems especially apropos for me in this chapter in life when I’m starting my Master’s degree, starting a new job/career, and trying to figure out what else I can do on the side to make a little extra money. If I do fall, I’m pretty sure it’ll still be okay, because I have a pretty solid support system, and I can ask for help to clean up the mess that results, or maybe I can relocate some of those things to do at a different time and give myself a little break from some of it. Whatever happens, I’ll most likely get through it, even if it feels too heavy for a time. But if I can set myself up with a solid footing from the start, paying attention to what my needs are, and being discerning in what I decide to take on, I can almost certainly get through it without too much falling apart.
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