more than lunch.

Last week, or something like that, I was approached by London and asked my favorite question of my every day – “What’s for lunch?”

I didn’t answer with my standard full of love and kindness response.

(Which, by the way, is a monosyllabic delivery of the word “food”.)

Nope.

I said something else.

I said, “Why don’t you decide what’s for lunch.  Would you and Mosely like to fix lunch?”

I said it to be funny.

I was laughing to myself.

But London replied, “Yes!  Please don’t come in the kitchen.”

So I did my part.

Which was nothing.

And I did it like a champ too, I’ll have you know.

When I was called to the lunch table a short time later, I was in for such a lovely surprise that it made me regret all of the times I answered “food” when asked what our next meal would be.

Lunch brought to us by my girls.

It was an honor.

I heard it as a song.

The Pretty.

Peaches sliced and diced and served in Torrye’s cute leftover pottery bowl.

Milk poured from its unattractive yellow plastic container into a charming green glass pitcher as old as our marriage and given to us as a wedding present.

It was Meal as Art.

A gift from my girls to me.

Scrambled eggs from our free-ranging yard birds.

Toast slathered with homemade strawberry jam.

The peaches.  The chocolate milk.

I fell in love at that lunch.

Fell in love again with my daughters.

In love with what is fun and enjoyable, flattering and sweet, fleeting and fabulous about my career.

I needed that glimpse.

Knee-deep in forced apologies and time outs and who-made-this-mess.

It was divine to bask in the meal and the gift and the love and the thought and the hope and the heart and the hands that whisked those eggs, toasted that bread, assembled that table.

My girls.

My little learners and watchers and doers.

I’m so lucky.

And I don’t want to forget that.