Mother Bird.

I am nesting. Just like that crazy fat robin, who for a time, dove at our heads and made a mess of our front porch ledge with its scraps of twine and eggshell. Lately I’ve been scouring every nook and cranny of our house, searching for another drawer to organize. Even our refrigerator cannot be tidy enough to suit me. I wish I could fill the doors with entirely new jars of strawberry jam and almond butter to replace the half-filled ones. And maybe alphabetize them too.

Yesterday I poured through years of old recipes strewn sideways into a box and spilling out from the top. I found lots of contributions from my mother, written in her familiar cursive that has evolved only slightly since she scrawled into my baby book in the seventies. I found her recipe for gumbo that made me miss New Orleans, and lots of old appetizers she used to make for Superbowl parties. They all went into a well-sorted binder and I moved on to two of many junk drawers in the house.

Meanwhile, Jeremy was in our closet hanging new shelves and assembling a laundry hamper. I cannot tell you how happy this made me…a fellow-nester in my very own home. We worked on the closet until midnight, and I drifted off to sleep thinking about how much I will enjoy color-sorting all our clothes today as I hang them back up in their renovated space.

I have been thinking about some of my goals for motherhood, like creating a signature grilled cheese sandwich, and making our house a creative place where our children feel inspired. (These are among the slightly shallower goals, filed after the important ones like raising a person of integrity and faith.) But I do want to build forts in the living room and help them cut paper snowflakes to scotch-tape to the windows at Christmastime.

When I was little, I always had an endless supply of Play-doh, and if I was ever bored, my mom usually sat me down with a stack of construction paper or some magazine pages to tear apart. I can remember painting shrinky-dinks, and molding silly putty into odd animal shapes. It taught me to imagine.

At the moment, all I can really imagine is how great it would feel to line up the bottles in my medicine cabinet according to size. And once that's done, I might clear some space in our extra bedroom for a future toy box, and some shelves for plastic scissors and jumbo crayons.