Kenzie's Room

Saturday was clean out day. Our office is being turned into Kenzie's room.

One of Kristie's first projects was to paint and strip the carpet from the upstairs hallway. This meant putting all of the furniture and what not (a book case, a dresser, and boxes and boxes of books) in KoKo's room. However, when she returned from South Dakota, we moved all of the things into the office.

Our next project is to transform the office into Kenzie's room. The only problem: the paint. Since the room was originally intended to be an office, Kristie chose a blue paint that came with a certain type of crystal that you mixed in. When added to the paint, the crystals give the paint texture - almost like sandpaper. We used the same type of paint in KoKo's room and she loves it. But having sandpaper covered walls is not what one wants in an infants room.

But the paint is not the only obstacle we have. There is a gigantic office unit that runs along two walls in the office as well. There also happens to be all of my crap (books, pictures and letters from my childhood, toys, Legos, and all of my Bengals paraphernalia).

We spent the better part of the day boxing everything up. Don't worry. Krisite let me hang Legos above our stairwell! I was afraid I'd have to bring them to school.

As we sifted through the photos and letters we made some interesting discoveries.

Apparently, my grandmother was obsessed with recipes. My uncle Jim said once that she was an excellent cook. Judging from all of her recipes - some fully written out in long hand painstakingly describing every step, some scrolled down on the back of snippets of paper, others cut from various newspapers, and amazingly several stubs from her electrical bills that actually came with recipes on the back - Myrtle must have had an amazing repertoire of dishes and desserts.

We also discovered that Myrtle had kept every graduation and wedding invitation she received from family members. Here we found my parents' wedding invitation perfectly preserved. This will go perfectly with a great picture we have of Mom and Dad dashing down the church steps after their wedding. We also found an invitation to Jim and Bonnie's wedding. I wish we would have found this sooner because they just celebrated their 50th anniversary recently. There were also graduation invites from all of her grand kids. We also found two diplomas of Myrtle's - one from the Bemidji teachers college and one later from the actually university itself.

It was quite the trip through the past.

It also drove home the importance of journaling. While my grandmother did leave many things behind for us, most of her actual words are not preserved because we never found any type of journal. What a priceless treasure that would have been. We discovered a small "Senior Memories" book that my mother kept, containing comments from her friends wishing her well in the future as well as my mom chronicling the highlights of her senior year (going to all the sporting events and cheerleading - somehow dating my father, though, wasn't mentioned all that much, maybe she was afraid Myrtle would find it?) is beyond value. My father too kept a small journal after Mom died. How I wish he would have written more!

Even if it is to just verify dates, a journal is priceless. A dozen times a day, I'm rummaging around the past and have a question about a date -- when did we begin baling hay at Loui's? Was it in '87 or '88? I remember that I was too small to stack the bales more than three high on the wagon, so Dad would stop every round or so and come back and help me stack them higher. However, after that summer, I took pride in being able to stack them all by myself. But what year was that? A couple quick notes from Dad would solve that mystery.

What I wouldn't give to read about Mom's thoughts and feelings about moving out to the farm in the summer of '84 or about Dad's thoughts and feelings when it came to his decision to quit trucking (even though it was only for a few years) and begin raising sheep.

Or Myrtle's thoughts on her youngest grandchild . . . how amazing and gifted she thought he was!

Or what were Mom and Dad's true opinions on events? How did Mom, a staunch democrat, survive the mid to late 80s of Regan and Bush? How did she feel when she took me to the old school house in our township to cast my first vote? Of course, we both were happy to see our votes go to the winner, Clinton.

Now that Mom and Dad are gone, I doubt that there is any detail too trivial that I wouldn't treasure now. Earlier this summer while cleaning out the cemetery, a former school mate of Mom's made sure to tell me how nice my mother was and how she looked up to Mom. She even went on to tell me how fabulous of a dancer my mother was. Apparently, and I remember hearing about this from Mom or Granny when I was young, Mom travelled to Grand Forks to be on a local version of American Bandstand. She danced and people could vote for you. Well, Mom was such a good dancer that she stayed on the show for several weeks.

I cannot tell you how much I appreciated that information.

When we finished going through Myrtle's things, Kristie said, "It kind of puts things in perspective. Imagine having your life reduced to recipe cards." I knew exactly how she felt, for I had written a poem for my thesis, a memoir of my grandmother, that focused on having ones life reduced to recipes, invitations, get well cards all crammed in an old musty smelling box.

So if you don't journal or write now, do so. If not for yourself, then for your children or grandchildren. Even a few minutes a day will rapidly accumulate. I am entering my third year of blogging this fall, and I already have several hundred pages worth of material. Now much of it is me blathering on about teaching, but there is also a lot of important information - information that I have forgotten all about -- in here. I was reminded of that when I went back last summer and examined all of the blog entries on Dad's battle with cancer. I would have lost so much had I not been blogging.

So if you don't journal, start your own blog. Send me a link too so I can keep up on it!