Ordinary Days

Recently I was talking to my father in law on the phone and he asked how my day had been.
"Oh, it's just been an ordinary day," I said.  "Just routine, doing ordinary things at work and around the house."
And then I got to thinking about all the years in the past when I spent what I would term ordinary days.  Grocery shopping, cleaning house, getting the kids off to school, picking them up in the afternoon, cooking dinner and then waiting for their father to come home so we could eat together.
He usually arrived home between five thirty and six, and then we would all set down around the table. Everyone had their assigned place and each one set in the same chair night after night.  Daddy at the head, me on his left,  The boys in their spots around the table. We all just naturally went to our place at the table. After the evening prayer we would commence our meal, and in those days I usually always cooked a lot.  An entree, a salad, at least two vegetables, a green and a yellow one, and then dessert.  When I picked our middle son up from school the first question he usually always asked was, 'what's for dessert'.  When I picked up the youngest one his first question usually was, 'what's for dinner.'
Now it seems to me those years flew by, although at the time it seemed like they would never end.  One day I turned around and those times around the dinner table were over.  Recently I tried to get everybody together for a family cookout and it took me three months to come up with a time that would work with everyone's schedule.  I no longer had to pick up kids from school, there was no need to stop whatever I was doing at four o'clock and start thinking about what I would cook that evening.  My husband and I found if we ate a large meal at night we didn't sleep too well, so in the evening we usually just had something light.  Those ordinary days that went for so long were now only memories.  I had to figure out who I was all over again.
When I stopped to think about it after that conversation with Pappa, I realized how thankful I was for ordinary days.  It was always a sense of relief in the evening when everyone arrived home safely.  Days when all the kids were well and being their usual 'pick at your brother' selves were really good days.  The conversations at the table were about what happened at school that day or what they wanted to get with their allowances when they could manage to save the money, and there was always the opportunity for which ever parent so felt inclined to offer to make up the difference if the afore mentioned child should have a shortage of funds.  It usually didn't happen, but the child usually made sure we had the opportunity to contribute if we felt the urge.
Sometimes the talk would be about Dad's work and what he had encountered as he set out to make a living for his brood.  And I always felt so thankful for the fact we never had a shortage of food.  Once my husband made the comment that a king two hundred years ago probably would not have been able to eat as well as we did.  Due to refrigeration and modern transportation there was an abundant of food from all over the world.  Bananas and pineapples, tomatoes and watermelons from Florida, green produce even in the winter, spices and herbs and good things, all taken for granted because they were, for the most part, ordinary things.
And so it seems, now as I look back on it, that the things I remember the most and the fondest are everyday things.  Ordinary things, things that made up the fabric of our lives.  And I realized you should never take those small ordinary things for granted, for some day they will become the big important things you remember.