Bittersweet Good-bye

Yesterday, Joshua and I went back to our Tulsa home to pack up a few final things and steam-clean the carpets before next Saturday’s open house. We both felt a little funny as we packed up the last boxes from our closets. After all, we came home from our honeymoon to that little white house with the huge magnolia tree in the front yard, and even though the neighborhood seemed to get a little shadier with each passing year, we will always remember that place fondly: the place where we settled into married life, where we planted our first garden and watched our little black weenie dogs chase the tennis ball in the backyard, where I studied for the bar exam, where we watched Dallas Cowboy games on the huge TV in our little living room, where we staged sibling slumber parties and taught our parents to play Nintendo Wii. There is no doubt in my mind that the time was right, but I have to admit that as we locked the doors and headed back to Bristow, it almost feels like it may be the end of an era.

Still, as we flipped through a few old photo albums, we found something that I think confirms that this farm plan may be meant to be. Joshua stumbled across a family history album that I made when I was in the 6th or 7th Grade. He was teasing me about my multi-colored and bubble letter captions for all the pictures when we discovered an oddly familiar drawing. Apparently, I included some stories about favorite family memories, among them, turtle-hunting with my cousins and Grandad at his farm in Bristow. I mentioned “how mad” Grandad was when the turtles ate things in his garden, a funny observation for a 12 year-old since, as an adult, I can imagine him speaking poorly of the turtles under his breath. I included the drawing with the story, but it took Joshua and me a minute to recognize it: It was a drawing of our farm house.

The rest of the album included several pictures of my grandmother, Betty, looking like a young Elizabeth Taylor, my grandfather, Donald, looking dashing in his Marine dress uniform, and plenty of hilarious pictures of my father, my mother and my aunts during puberty and looking, well, sufficiently awkward. We also found plenty of Grandad’s campaign materials, including a bumper sticker, campaign literature, a thank-you note on his State Representative stationery, and plenty of newspaper clippings from the Bristow Record-Citizen and the Mannford Eagle, talking about the campaign and his opponents, including, at least initially, fellow Democrat Stephen Foster, sans moustache, a senior member of our Creek County Bar Association and one of my favorite Bristow lawyers!

Among the items included in my silly album, we discovered a family history questionnaire in Grandad’s hand-writing. I thought it might be a treat for me to type his answers and post them here on the blog so stay tuned….

Without prompting, Mom and Dad arrived around 2:00 PM to help us. I think they knew we would need some inspiration to get the job finished! Dad and Joshua cut and piled limbs while Mom and I finished boxing up some things from the top shelves of our closets. We are essentially out now, save a few things in the backyard shed. We couldn’t have down it without Mom and Dad…and I don’t just mean today! We are so blessed to have wonderful parents.
Besides the album, we found a few other gems, including my first Nintendo Gameboy. It is about as thick as a brick and weighs about five pounds. We decided, given the innovation that is the IPod, we could finally get rid of the Sony Discmans that we haven’t used in years. We even found an old Sony Discman that I had for several years before we married. Joshua apparently had one just like it, and we weren’t sure whether this was his ancient CD player or mine...until we opened it. I found a Boyz II Men CD, and Joshua wanted me to be very explicit on this posting that said CD does not belong to him….allegedly.