And the floors shall be filled with wheat
I was off the hook for most food prep today as I had dinner ("dinner": lots of cheesy bread) at the Brazilian consulate. Sadly, I wasn't there to get a travel visa. I was only there for a social event for which I would get extra credit in class. It was okay. There was free food and Portuguese-speaking people, both of which are enjoyable to me. There was also samba dancing and loud drums, which are less enjoyable to me, but sometimes things you want in life come with things you don't. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Thanks especially to my free food bag, my shelf in the refrigerator is starting to look shockingly diverse and colorful, for my fridge shelf. I have always stocked a lot of white and brown: milk, bread, milk, cheese, milk, meat, milk. Suddenly I have all this color. If it weren't Lent and I weren't on a budget, I would admire the color palette and then not eat any of it, but now I have no choice, for which I'm honestly grateful, because figuring out what to do with it is fun (there's a lesson in there, too).
Never before have I been grateful from the heart to see vegetables in my refrigerator. There's something about living with just a little deprivation that turns occasional plentitude into such a deep, primordial joy, much deeper than the mild contentment of always having more than enough. The Bible is full of passages equating happiness with the abundance of corn, which seemed unimaginative to me a child but seems absolutely viscerally appropriate, now.
"Thou shalt bless the crown of the year of thy goodness: and thy fields shall be filled with plenty. The beautiful places of the wilderness shall grow fat: and the hills shall be girded about with joy, The rams of the flock are clothed, and the vales shall abound with corn: they shall shout, yea they shall sing a hymn."
Yea, I shall!