It’s been a busy and productive couple of days.

My brother in-law came over on the weekend and we installed an electric awning over the postage stamp-sized slab of concrete in the back yard that passes for our patio. Afterwards I dug out the furniture we had buried away and knocked together a small coffee table from some of the scrap wood that’s been accumulating in the garage.

It’s not exactly top of the line furniture, but it answers to the work it’s called to do, and has just enough dents, gouges, and imperfections to bless it with what a more gracious observer might refer to as “a rustic sort of character”. I torched and sanded the table before I sealed it, and the ordeal seems to have reawakened something inside the wood.

But isn’t that what ordeals often do?

I’m reminded of the difficulties I’ve faced during my recovery work; the dents and gouges – visible and invisible – that mark the trials of growing up as the child of an alcoholic and emotionally unstable father, and a fiercely and terminally codependent mother.

These experiences have shaped me accordingly; sanded away a few of my straighter edges…left me a good deal more than a little bit scrappy. And yet, in spite of – or perhaps more accurately, because of – all of this, I seem to notice that nearly every day something else inside me reawakens…