...brighten the corner...

It is just a little thing--a white sugar bowl with little red flowers and gilt edging.  It is amazing how such a little thing can be so cheerful.  When I come downstairs at O-dark-thirty to start putting breakfast bowls on the table and packing lunches, the lamplight gleams off the gilt.  The flowers nearly jump out of their pattern onto the table, and some mornings that little sugar bowl makes me so happy it isn’t right. 

I love the color red.  It is so cheerful.  Even a tiny bit of it brightens up a whole outfit, or a whole room.  My little sugar bowl sat with its matching creamer on a very slightly chipped matching meat platter on a metal shelving unit at a flea market housed in the old shirt factory building here in town.  It was only $4, the whole set of them--and I didn’t need a sugar bowl.  Or a creamer.  Or a slightly chipped matching meat platter.  But as I was walking by, minding my own business, on my way to pick up some forgotten necessity from the grocery section, it fairly jumped out at me--tiny red flowers and slightly rubbed gilt edges gleaming cheerfully in the florescent lighting, little red flower fairies (nearly jumping off the china) crying in their little voices (sort of like the dolls in the children‘s story of the Little Engine that Could), “Please, please, little mama, take us home with you!  We will be worth every penny of that $4; we will make your table so bright!”

How could I resist?  So I have a sugar bowl, creamer, and slightly chipped meat platter that I do not, strictly speaking, need.  But how much brighter my table is--and my heart, too, come to think of it--because of those happy little red flowers and gilt edging.  It doesn’t matter to them whether the lighting is harsh florescence or soft lamplight.  It doesn’t matter to them that the sugar is a little damp and sticky from children helping themselves to it, or if the table is a bit sticky because we forgot to wipe it.  They will gleam in the light and hold the sticky sugar until the china breaks.

And our little corner is brighter for them...

The song "Brighten the Corner (Where You Are)" has brightened many of my dark days...I find that sometimes even when I am low I can still brighten the corner of the world where He has placed me, right now.  Below are links to two youtube videos taken from old 45 recordings of this song.


The Browns--"Brighten the Corner Where you Are"

The Statesmen--"Brighten the Corner"