There is a phrase I’ve found myself returning to lately.
A sandwich and a chair.
Simple things.
Not grand gestures. Not complicated plans. Not fixing every problem or finding every answer. Just a sandwich and a chair.
A place at the table. A place to rest.
A reminder that someone thought to leave the light on for you.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to suspect that much of what we call love looks a lot like this. Not fireworks, just simple hospitality.
A comfortable place to land when the road has been long.
This spring has been full of family.
We’ve been working on the cottage in New York - clearing rooms, making plans, dreaming about paint colors and wood floors, deciding what stays and what goes. There is still much to do, preparing rooms not lived in. But I’ve begun to wonder if much of life is exactly that.
Preparing rooms before we know who will walk through the door. Planting gardens before we see blossoms. Making beds before guests arrive. Creating a space for something we cannot yet see.
This past week, I had a dream about a woman I had never met.
She appeared as naturally as an old friend, she introduced herself by name. A first name I had not heard before, attached to a last name that was distantly familiar.
She looked like someone from the 1950’s…Her dark hair pinned back. Her paisley dress. The feeling of familiarity she carried. I asked my father if he knew someone by her name, and he did.
She had been a close friend of my grandmother many years ago. A woman who had shared meals, stories, and community with our family long before I arrived.
I spent days thinking about that and why she appeared in my dream to introduce herself, shake my hand and join a gathering at the lake.
I’ve wondered how many people helped prepare the rooms we now know?
How many hands planted trees whose shade they would never sit beneath?
How many women set tables, stitched quilts, hosted chicken dinners, built communities, carried stories, and held hope for futures they would never personally see?
Perhaps that is what ancestors do.
They prepare rooms.
And perhaps our job is not so different.
At Tweetle Dee, our motto has always been:
Celebrate. Dream. Create.
For years I thought of those as separate steps. Now I wonder if they are really one continuous circle.
Celebrate where you are.
Dream about what could be.
Create space for it to arrive.
Then begin again.
Celebrate.
Dream.
Create.
The cottage is teaching me this. Every board we repair. Every room we clear.
Every plan we make for a future visit. It is an act of faith.
Not because we know exactly what comes next. But because hope itself is a form of creation.
Life asks for patience.
It asks us to trust the work happening beneath the surface. To believe that clearing a room matters even when we don’t know who will occupy it. To trust that making a place welcoming has value even when we are still waiting.
In my dream my Dad was sitting in a chair, not speaking. Just smiling watching the activity with children at a bonfire, some on the dock watching the water and children coloring on the porch.
I told him that there would always be a sandwich and a comfortable chair waiting for him at the cottage.
I meant it literally. But I think I meant something more, too.
I think what I wanted him to know was this:
You belong here.
There is a place for you.
You do not have to earn your seat at the table.
And perhaps that is what all of us are longing to hear.
Perhaps that is what we are creating when we paint, garden, stitch, write, cook, build, and then love, extend forgiveness and patiently wait.
Just a sandwich and a chair.
A place where those we know and those we have not yet met, might someday arrive and find rest.
This week, I hope you take some time to celebrate.
I hope you make room for your dreams.
And I hope you continue creating the life that is quietly preparing itself around you.
The rooms you are tending today may become someone’s refuge tomorrow.
Including your own.
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