Old & New

I came across an old broken cubby wall organizer in our basement last week. I wondered why we had stopped using it because it was so cute and the perfect size for our mugs. I cleaned it, fixed it and hung it so proudly on our kitchen wall. I then filled it with every mug we have. Our Mickey Mouse we collected on our honeymoon over eleven years ago, my blessed mug. The new adorable elephant one I had stumbled across in a store last week. We somehow perfectly had twelve mugs to fill each of the twelve cubbies.

My husband came home that day and told me how much he loved what I had done. It looked so nice and really brought a nice feeling to that spot on a kitchen wall we had never known what to do with. That space had changed so many times over the years but this look really felt like it completed us. I was so pleased with myself.

It hung beautifully on the wall for about a week. Last night, I was woken up to the sound of a loud bang. The wooden cubby shelf had come apart, and fell right off the wall. Nearly even single one of my favorite mugs were smashed in the process. The Mickey Mouse from our honeymoon, my blessed mug and the cute new elephant mug I had picked up last week, all destroyed. It was heartbreaking to say the least. I knew my daughter especially would take it hard because she struggles with things like that. She is one who wants to keep all the things, forever.

So I spun the pain around to ease the situation for both of us. I said, we can cry over this and dwell on what we have lost. Or, we can look at it as an opportunity to build something new. Now we can go out and shop for a new shelf that we get to choose. And, we get to start a whole new mug collection. So instead of having twelve cubbies all filled. We have twelve brand new cubbies we get to fill. Years ahead of us that we get to collect with better memories and much cooler mugs.