What to do with Old Travel Brochures & Dried Roses?
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Another Thursday. Moving was in two days. The moms were painting as quickly as possible – yellow, red, and green. Collette was packing as quickly as possible, everything in sight. And OLeif continued to shuttle over boxes to the house during the day while he was at work. Collette was thankful that the week was rapidly coming to a close.
Thursdays somehow managed to pass very quickly, generally speaking. And that particular Thursday was another one of those types of days. It was partially a crazy day with preparations being made for a congregational meeting the following Sunday. Although why there was always such a hullabaloo made regarding congregational reports, Collette never knew.
Because of the order of the day, Ivy was only able to squeak in a tiny breakfast at shortly after nine and a small bite of chicken sometime after two o’clock between phone calls and paper work. She had been sick that week, had skipped work Tuesday to recover, and had skipped working with the junior high the night before. She was still tired that morning. She and Collette finally left at 4:30 or so in order for Ivy to make her dinner appointment with Idlewild’s mother at Ruby Tuesday’s at five o’clock.
This busy-ness was a contagious thing.
It was the Red-Green Banquet that night for Joe’s Boy Scout Troop, and only Mom was going to be able to make it that year, seeing as everyone had heard about it rather last-minute. Dad and Frances were at Scout elections at his troop that night, Carrie was at work, Rose was at class, and Linnea… well, Collette wasn’t entirely sure what Linnea would be doing during the rest of the evening activities. Nevertheless, it was the year of the T-Bone Patrol for Joe, and it was a proud time.
Meanwhile, in the mail at the new house came a card from Grandma Combs, welcoming them into their new life as home-owners.
And Collette was finally seeing progress with the packing that evening. Mostly it was papers, books, and more papers. She thought (for the hundredth time) that night, that perhaps, just perhaps, she wrote too much and kept too many travel brochures. There were only so many pieces of information she needed on back-packing trips through the Alps or cruises to Taiwan, after all. And yet she invariably held on to them all. She decided that there would also come a time very soon that she would begin to dispose of old wedding cards, but there were many thoughtful notes amongst them, and it wouldn’t do to throw them away.
There was also the matter of the dried roses. OLeif had given her two dozen roses a couple of years before, which she had dried, and were currently hanging upside-down from her Chinese gong and a floor lamp. OLeif did not exactly like the thought of “dead flowers” hanging from anything in the house. So Collette thought that maybe she would not take them either, unless she hung them from the floorboards in the basement. She still had the roses that Dad gave her for her 16th birthday in a glass vase, covered in tulle, which she would keep in the old cabinet with her and Rose’s antique books.
All in all, it was really rather a dull day.