Home Sweet Home

Every time there's a wedding in our family, Papa Bear likes to take the new family member around to see all the houses we've lived in over these 38 years of marriage. We've had quite an adventurous real estate history. Those reality TV shows got nuthin' on us. So we headed out with our daughter and her fiance last week, running all over metro Atlanta to tout our accomplishments. Many of them were still in great shape, some of them not so much. But when we pulled in to see our very first little house (I believe it was 800+ square feet), I was flooded with nostalgia and memories. 

It was in the slums of Mableton, on a narrow little street of tiny row houses next to the railroad tracks. We didn't even have a down payment. Ken's Pop gifted us $800 so we could buy it (it was a gift but we paid him back eventually). When we saw what our note was going to be, we were nervous. The house was a complete mess, not liveable and had to be gutted. When we got through demolishing the rot and ruin, you could see all the way to the other end of the house. There were massive holes in the kitchen and bathroom floors. I'll never forget Ken single-handedly picking up the cast-iron tub and hauling it out of the house. He was a beast.

It was a tough time. We were living with my folks, I was pregnant with our first baby, and we were trying to learn how to do things we had never remotely attempted before. Ken thought he had married a sweet honey of a gal, but with all those pressures, the hellcat came out and he didn't know what hit him. We worked our tails off, my Daddy teaching Ken how to do basic carpentry and my Mama teaching me how to sew, paint and put up wallpaper. It was an unexpected gift that was tortuous in many ways, but also laid the foundation for our future endeavors. In a few short months we moved in. I was very great with child, extremely tired and frankly scared. I would sit with my hands on the whirling dervish that was my tummy, wondering how in the world I was going to raise this young'un. I didn't want to mess it up. I kept asking the doctors if he was not huge, because it seemed like I had an elephant in there. They kept reassuring me that "it" was measuring normal size and that it would probably be around 7-1/2 pounds. They also said that it was a girl, because of the heart rate. But I knew it was a son, sure as shootin. I had had dreams. And he moved around in there like a bull moose. He ended up being my smallest, at 10 pounds, 8 ounces and 22 inches long. He's 35 years old now and still a bull moose, but with a heart of gold.

Seeing that little house again made me misty with remembering my baby son. We were young, strong, hopeful and clueless. I never knew I could love something as much as I loved that wriggling, wailing bundle of man-child. I saw us as standing in the face of all that is evil in the world with God on our side and the wind at our back. Time and troubles etch away at us, but it pays to remember the noble purposes of our youth. God often uses those waves to propel us over the course of a lifetime, else we might cave when the going gets rough. Thankful...