House & Family: Living Memory

Back in November, I spent half of my Thanksgiving Break cleaning the house. This place was home to 3 generations (soon to be 4) of my wife's family. It shows. Yes, there is some wear and tear, but I don't mean that. Those issues should all be relatively easy to fix. What I mean is that there is a treasure trove in the house of items my wife's family would find meaningful. I found photographs, not only of my wife as a little girl (which my 2-year-old daughter insists are pictures of herself), but of several generations.

There were, I think, hundreds of photos. There were also little meaningful trinkets: my father-in-law's spurs from his very early years of cowboy work, countless tools that had accummulated over decades of hard work, self-sufficiency, and manual labor, a high school letter jacket from a family friend so close my wife calls her a sister (a degree of familial closeness I envy).

There's a lot of cleaning and restoring left to do, but today, on my anniversary, I cherish the thought that part of what I'm doing is restoring the living memory of my wife's family and the heritage of my children.

God bless,

Micah