A Pretty Good Trade, Huh?

I got Squizzle to take a rare morning nap, and after a sick day at home for Reaggers and Bub, they have joined forces with Peff to get up to their usual tricks.

Last week, we did our annual pre-Christmas purge, going through the toy room with a snow shovel (I'm not kidding). It was an overdue chore that makes the house feel a thousand times better now that it is done. Since I have no access to a pickup truck, I had the city deliver one of their neighborhood clean up dumpsters to the drive way. They are free and you can schedule them twice a year. We opened the end of the dumpster, lined the kids up and gave them things to take out, one a time.

They thought the dumpster was the neatest thing since sliced bread. They should have found it the neatest thing since gamma-globulin shots, because I'm fairly certain that they all have tetanus, hepatitis, and possibly cholera for their efforts. But now that it is clean, the kids are up there playing. Peff is pounding on the organ, Reaggers is puffing on a recorder and Bub is hitting a bucket like a drum and playing a harmonica.

In the paraphrased words of Clark Griswold, "Hallelujah! Holy Crap! Where's the Tylenol?"

On a sad note, during the purge, I found yet another box in the storage room that had been destroyed by the great flood of '08. If you haven't heard the story, last summer, our 20 year old hot water heater sprung a leak. Since it is in a closet in the garage, it took who knows how long to discover it. The water dripped down a pipe access hole in the wooden floor of the closet and into the storage area in the basement. We didn't find out about it until the carpet in our bedroom got wet. About half the stuff we had in storage got ruined, including the Christmas decorations. It put a sour note on an otherwise very nice Christmas last year. The kids letters to and from Santa, all their school made ornaments, and some sentimental knickknacks were all destroyed (including my Simpson's Christmas village that we had spent years and more money than I care to think about collecting).

Fortunately the tree and Mom's knitted Christmas socks were in a box that miraculously did not get wet. Now I bring this up for two reasons. First, I found that other box during the purge (and I will get back to that, I promise). Second, just last week, the Boss and I were at the store looking at decorations. The subject of the lost ornaments came up; in particular one little Pillsbury Dough Boy riding a spatula that the Eldest picked when she was not quite one for her first Christmas ornament. It broke the Boss's heart that it was gone, and I tried, rather lamely, to convince her that what counts with those things is the memories they represent. The times from early in our family when the Eldest was small, the kids first Christmas's and the like. "It's gone," I said "and there's nothing we can do about it. We just have to keep the memories and forget about the things." The Boss agreed and we dropped it.

Until the next day when we pulled out the decorations box. While the kids were hanging ornaments, I found a little knickknack box in the bottom. It was hidden by some Christmas table cloths. Guess what was in that box?

I'm all in. Whatever you want, Lord. No one can tell me that Father in Heaven does not answer the prayers of a mother's heart. Moses didn't part the red sea, no one walked on water or healed the blind (yet), but you can not convince me that the silly little Dough Boy ornament was not a miracle on par with any of those. It was quite the thing to experience, and I'm grateful for it because it steeled me for the rest of the week.

Which brings me back to the box of destroyed stuff I found. When I cleaned up the storage closet after the flood, I wound up tossing about half of what was in there. I checked everything else and put it back into storage. I must have missed this box, because it was pretty well destroyed. And it contained the bulk of my mission stuff. Two or three photo albums, my Chinese scriptures, my discussions, my language cards, and of course, my journal. I'm still not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I have to (and want to) keep the advice I gave the Boss last week. It's the memories that are important, not the physical representation of them. On the other hand, a journal is recorded memories.

For years, I have said that I am grateful for my mission, but if I never see any of those I served with again, I'll be ok. I don't miss them. I learned what I needed to learn, and I moved on. It has not escaped me that none of them has tried to hunt me down, either. More importantly, I'm not that guy anymore. If someone were to read those pages (and trust me... no one could read them now if they wanted to), the man writing this post and the kid writing that journal would have no clue as to who the other really was or has become. So while I may have lost a memory of what I was, I have lost nothing of what it made me.

And this leads me to two conclusions. First, I prefer a blog to a journal. Now if the house burns down, a flood rises up, my computer crashes, the apes take over or whatever; I can't lose the next chapters of my life the way I lost the first (Even Nephi lost a few pages off the front of his record, that's not bad company, is it?).

And second?

I'd trade every picture, letter, journal and souvenir of Taiwan in order to see the Boss light up again like she did when that Dough Boy fell out of the box. It was a fair trade I'd take any day of my life. Thanks again, Lord.

Merry Christmas!!