Monday Morning’s Cupboard—Kate Gaston

"We all yearn, with unrequited desire, to know and be fully known."

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An Alabama native, Kate was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance.

Monday Morning’s Cupboard

by Kate Gaston

I dry the last drops of water 
from a vintage stoneware plate.
Looking around your kitchen 
uncertainly, I stack the plate 
in your cupboard.

Monday morning will find 
every dish you own stored 
somewhere entirely new,
a helter-skelter hodgepodge 
of cups, plates, and bowls.

Your graciousness extends 
even to that; you allow willing hands
to misplace your dishes 
without even a deep sigh.
You simply put on another kettle for tea.

Tea, the balm for our parched, 
conversant throats; 
trademark, cornerstone, and glory
of your specific brand 
of consecrated hospitality.

Red-haired babes with impish grins
claim biscuits, laps, and 
hearts with equal ease; they steal 
away at bedtime with one last dash 
through a thicket of legs.
A gray cat nurses her young in a corner;
candles sway in stately dance.

Artists and musicians, poets, 
and dreamers from here 
to Saskatoon gather in reverent 
conversation. Drawn across 
your threshold from God 
knows where on our way 
to God only knows.
Yet here, for an hour or two, we pause.

Some of us, with bloody heart
roots dangling from abrupt 
transplantation moan in silent 
mourning. Some of us, with hard-earned 
wisdom, speak gracious peace.

We all yearn, with unrequited desire, 
to know and be fully known.
We wait, assured that this feasting and 
communion we share now will find 
its perfect consummation on some better shore.

So, feast, friends, and be blessed.
Swig the last dregs of your mug.

Go in peace, 
knowing that, like dishes 
stacked in Monday morning’s cupboard,
we will find ourselves 
used, sorted, misplaced.
Yet, inevitably, found again. 

---

Foto de Sinitta Leunen en Unsplash