Things…… ok

With summer and family reunions, and family trips, it is natural to recall other trips, or other family memories that such occasions call to mind.   I know that has been our experience this summer.  Who we are and why we are becomes the stuff of conversations riding in a car, or gathering around a shared meal we feel free to voice our recollections with shared companions.

One of my daughters expressed to me this, “Mom, “things” have never been so important to you, have they?  You didn’t have a lot of things growing up, did you?”    I just smiled.   I didn’t have a lot of “things” as society thinks, but, oh what I did have!  First of all, I had a home where happiness was not measured by what you had, but by what you had to share.  Our home became on many occasions a food bank, a sanctuary, a repository of help in health and business advice for a small bit of real estate that society had forgotten.

We had a pristinely clean and orderly home, with a white fence that I had to keep painted!  We had glorious food, ample clothing, and a yard filled with zinnias on both sides of the back door, lilac bushes, peonies, hydrangeas, grape harbors, and two vegetable gardens that filled our table and our bellies.  Things!  If a thing was needed in our home it was for the comfort of our family, like a furnace to replace wood stoves, inner spring mattresses to replace feather ticks, or even straw ticks,  water piped into the house, electricity that changed our lives forever.  That was my world growing up.

Bill and I tried to replicate this style in our own home, and I think the girls got the message.  Time together was more important than things, time was that intangible gift that we could give them that didn’t have a price tag attached.  Grandchildren, get your Mom to tell you about the Holstein Convention trips she took!  Many times, loading everyone into a nine passenger station wagon or the “Barth” motor home and off we went. Eight track tapes blaring, cherries in the refrigerator, Barbara asleep before we got out of Rockingham county, Cathy sitting behind Bill’s seat talking about cuts and fills on the highway.    “Things!”  Not so many….just enough.  We all should know when we have “Just enough.”  Thanks be to God.