The Joy of Openly-displayed Knives

This time last year, I was bemoaning my broken house. I lived on subfloor, my washer had died, the guest bathroom leaked, and I hadn't had hot water in three months. None of that is true now. How that happened is another story, but my house is no longer broken.

Elizabeth has been mostly stable, and she has not been hospitalized in over four years. She graduated with a diploma and a graduation party, which was far more important to her than the diploma. She comes home every Saturday and goes back to her AFL home on Sunday. She has full days of volunteering, she takes a hip-hop class, and she works her paying job on Sunday mornings.

One of the gifts of her stability is that I have revived my hobby of plant parenthood. Now I get to see them as plants and no longer as projectiles. Occasionally a pot gets broken, but that's usually the fault of the cats and not the kid. I love leaves as others love birds; each one seems so different and miraculous in their variegation and texture.

But the big news is that I got a knife rack. It's magnetic and I have it on the side of the refrigerator, with all my knives openly displayed. The knives aren't the sharpest, but I no longer have to go through the drawers to find one. They are there right out in the open.

This may not seem like a big thing to you, but it is to me. When you have a child hospitalized for mental illness and they are sending you home without help or hope, the thing that they always tell you is to be sure to lock up the knives. I dutifully did that because it was something to do, even though it wasn't really what was needed.

I am inordinately proud of my knife rack. And I know, as you do, that it's not really about the knife rack. But it's a gift of grace, nonetheless, and I think I'll go look at it again.