Godless Mom in the Bible Belt

I've spent the better part of this week preparing for a neighborhood garage sale.

My parents moved here to Houston from a small town in Utah three years ago. My father's health was such that he needed to live at a lower elevation and they were having a difficult time keeping up with their home and small acerage located in a very rural and isolated town. I know that Houston would never have been their first choice of places to live, but I was here and the elevation was right. However, they are both positive people and have made the most of their situation.

My parents are relics from an earlier time. Daddy is a WWII veteran, Mom is the daughter of Kansas dry farmers. I came along quite unexpectedly when they were both well into their 40s, a brand new baby born during the Summer of Love to two people who had grown up during the Great Depression. Talk about generation gap! But I am who I am because of (and sometimes in spite of) these two powerful souls. I love both of my parents deeply and I know they love me, despite the fact that they rarely grok me.

That being said, OMG the amount of CRAP they have been carting around for the last 6 decades! I have a double garage with a 15 foot extension off the back and I have been unable to get my car into it since they moved here from Utah. There are boxes filled with fabric and back issues of magazines, power tools that haven't functioned for more than a decade, an antique barber pole, two or three sets of china, old peanut butter bottles, assorted lids off of tupperware containers, the REALLY UGLY chandelier that hung in my bedroom when I was a kid...you get the picture. Mom insists that all of this stuff is valuable and that she just needs to go through it. I just do a mental eye-roll and say, "Okay Mom, let me know if I can help." And so it sits there.

However, two days ago I came across two boxes of stuff that really made me glad that my parents collect the things they do. The boxes were filled with old toys, artwork and writings from my childhood through my early college years and boy did I take a walk down memory lane!

There was Jackie, my stuffed duck (a gift when I was 4 from a neighbor who meant a great deal to me.) I found the piggy bank my father won for me at the Utah State Fair when I was 7, the nightgown my grandma made for me when I was 5 and the doll clothes my mother had so carefully stitched together for my favorite Rub-a-Dub Dolly. I found pages of writing that I had done as a teenager, the kind of writing that comes from the soul-deep and very real pain inevitably felt by people over the age of 12 and under the age of 22. I found graded papers with comments written by teachers who really cared and notes that I had passed back and forth to my classmates on paper covered in doodles.

The flood of emotions I experienced as I sorted through these boxes is hard to describe, with each new discovery my heart was jerked in a different direction. However, one emotion that was notably absent...regret. I looked back on these things that marked the course of my early life and I knew that each and every one of them was part of the puzzle that makes me. For better or for worse I am who I am because of the foundation that was laid by the events represented in those two boxes. Laughter, love, joy, pain, fear, anxiety but no regret.

So, I too will place my daughter's treasures in a box and perhaps on down the road she will also have the opportunity to lift them one by one out of the dusty reaches of memory and touch upon the events that will color her life. I hope that she too will have no regrets.