Month: March 2010

Sort of like the beginning to all of those great mystery stories . . . it was a dark and stormy night. 

The moving truck was packed.  Maile was out in our mini-van, parked on the street and pointed in the right direction.  The van she was driving, like the moving truck, was stuffed – it looked like the migrant workers’ vehicles from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, loaded down with food and suitcases and mattresses hanging over the side (minus the dead grandparent in the back). 

We had to shoehorn the four kids into their booster and baby seats.  The rain started to pour down, and the night seemed very, very dark.  Maile’s parents were parked behind her, their headlights illuminating the street, their windshield wipers fighting off the weather.

I waved at Mai to wait and ran back through the garage and into the house.  My wet shoes slipped and screeched on the hardwoods.  The stillness in the house seemed surprised at my entrance.  I walked up through the empty floors – the home to which we had brought Abra and Sam after they were born.  Lucy’s favorite hide-and-seek spot was in that top bedroom closet.  Cade’s first bus stop was just up the road.

What was God trying to do with our lives?  Why had he brought us to Virginia – was it just to straddle us with more financial debt, only to bring us new friends and then uproot us once again?  Why had he, with such seeming felicity, helped us buy this house, only to put us in a position where we had to give it back? 

I just didn’t have the answers.  I locked the front door, put all the keys on the kitchen island, and walked out through the garage, the door coming down behind me. 

It was true what Tolkien wrote in one of his books – adventures seem wonderful in the daylight, when the weather is good for hiking and the wind is at your back.  But at night, when it’s cold and it starts to rain, memories of sitting in your warm house beside the fire can make you homesick.

I climbed up up up into that huge moving van and turned the ignition as the beams of light from the closing garage slid down on to the wet street.  The deisel monster grumbled to life.  We hit the road, and soon we were cruising north on Route 15, roaring towards our new existence. 

Our new adventure.

***

To continue reading this story, click HERE

Now, as promised, Tuesday’s Top Ten:

(drumroll please)

Top Ten Breakfast Cereals

10) Chocolate Chip Wheatabix – unless you’ve lived overseas you’ve probably never heard of this flaky, honey-flavored cereal with real chocolate chips in it.  I don’t know that I ever even took the time to pour them in a bowl and add milk – it was pretty much straight from the box into my laughing-gear.  Go to Trader Joe’s and buy a box.  You’re life will never be the same.

9) Fruity Pebbles – my wife’s favorite cereal.  My 9^th favorite cereal.  We all know who is right.

8)  Cookie Crisp – smaller-than-bitesized cookies floating around in milk?  Are you kidding me?

7) Corn Chex – one of two non-sugar cereals that cracked my top ten.  If you’re looking for corn-flavored crunch, it can’t be beat (and the criss-cross pattern really does lock out milk moisture)

6) Cinnamon Toast Crunch – cinnamon.  cinnamon.  cinnamon.

5) Cheerios – for those of you who know me, you’ll be very surprised that a non-sugar cereal made it into the top five.  I actually considered the case for Cheerios being number one, as I’ve probably consumed more individual Cheerios than any other food on the planet . . . COMBINED.  My mother used to tell me that I was going to turn into a Cheerio.  I didn’t.  Sorry mom.  But I still love Cheerios.

4) Cocoa Puffs – should be illegal as a breakfast cereal, because it’s so good, and so chocolatey.  It’s kind of like eating a Hershey’s Bar for breakfast.  But eating chocolatey goodness for breakfast is not illegal, so it’s number four on my list.  WARNING: high sugar and caffiene content – do not serve to small children anytime after 5:00pm.

3) Apple Jacks – talk about deceptive.  There is nothing Apple about this.  More appropriate names would have been Sugar Jacks or Radioactively Orange Jacks or So-Good-You’ll-Eat-The-Box-In-One-Sitting Jacks

2) Fruit Loops – once again, notice the deception in my top three:  first apples, now a reference to fruit.  Really it’s just pure sugar.

1) Lucky Charms – you just can’t beat a cereal with marshmallows.  You especially can’t beat a cereal when the marshmallow to cereal ratio is 2:1.

Honorable Mentions – Frosted Flakes (awesome while they’re crunchy, which lasts about 10 seconds); Captain Krunch Berries; Trix (before they changed the recipe); Frosted Mini-Wheats

So what favorite cereals did I forget?

Most days in life seem to simply pass.  Wake up, shower, breakfast, work, lunch, home, dinner, kids to bed, read, light out, fall sleep.  Most days come and go and leave only a subtle trace that they have been, and gone, like kids walking across the top of a hard snow drift.

But there are handfuls of days which we will not forget, days when our feet fall through and leave deep craters, days which somehow manage to steer the course of those that follow. 

September 4^th, 2009 was one of those days.

My painting business was struggling.  All year Maile and I had spoken in hushed tones about worst-case scenarios, what it meant, where we were headed.  But on that Friday we suddenly realized we could not pay some huge marketing bills that were closing in.  Our mortgage payment was due.  And while we could pay the things we had to pay (cash flow is not a problem for most painting businesses in September), a huge mound of debt was rising up in the background, it’s shadow falling down all around us.

“Do you think we should move in with your parents?” Maile asked me, eyes filling with tears, not because my parents would be terrible to live with, and not because their basement is a dungeoun filled with devices of torture.  She was sad because we were comfortable in the life we had created, and it would be difficult to leave. 

Whew.  These are the days we do not forget.

Then, two months later, another day.  Another falling through.

I backed the moving truck up to our townhouse’s garage.  It was so large that it swayed precariously as the large tires bounced up over the curb.  I walked around behind it and let down the ramp.  It grated like fingernails on a chalkboard. 

I stared into that empty truck.  Our friends would be arriving soon, folks we had grown very close to during the previous four years:  folks from our small group, my friends, Maile’s mommy friends.  And they would help us load our life into a truck, and we would drive away.

Just then my two oldest kids ran out through the garage, up the ramp and into the huge expanse of loading truck.  They ooooh’d and aaaaah’d over the sheer size of it.  They jumped up and down on the wheel wells, making it sway back and forth.  They laughed as they shouted their names deep into its recesses, and their voices came richocheting back.

“Lucy!”  LUCY, Lucy, lucy . . .

“Cade!”  CADE, Cade, cade . . .

And then I saw.  They didn’t have a real worry in the world – this was an exciting trip back to the place where their daddy grew up, back to where lots of their cousins lived and there were farms and cows and snow in the winter.  Back to where their Mimi and Papa Smucker lived.  Plus, their Mimi and Grampa Silva were there with us, in person, helping with the move. 

They had absolute trust that I would provide shelter for them, and food, and anything else that they needed. 

They were excited, because even they, at 6 and 4 years old, could tell that we were about to embark on our greatest adventure yet.  I didn’t see it then, but, looking back, something makes perfect sense to me.  I understand a little better what Jesus said about children:

“The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these”

***

To read the continuation of this story, click HERE

As some of you know, I’ve been blogging this year about my family’s voyage into life without television.  My wife and I decided to give it a shot, going a year without tv.

So far so good (you can read more about this at my old blog site: shawnsmucker.blogspot.com).

But I did get a little tired of being confined to writing about what we’re NOT doing.  There’s a lot I’d rather be writing about than “not watching television”.

So what better time to start some new topics than with the kickoff of my new blog (that’s what you’re reading right now).  I’m thinking that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I’ll start telling the story of our decision to move back to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the place I grew up.  We’ve lived in Florida, England and Virginia, so moving home was not always a foregone conclusion.  These posts will also include my thoughts on our identity as humans and why it’s so important to discover your identity, as our decision to move to Lancaster also included our monumental decision (at least it felt monumental) regarding whether or not I would try to pursue writing as a full time vocation.

On Tuesdays I think I’ll do a simple list, just to keep it light:  Tuesday’s Top Ten.  I’ll tell you right now, there are some serious top tens I am looking forward to (breakfast cereals, Seinfeld moments, and uses for belly button lint, just to name a few). 

Thursdays will be dedicated to one of my other passions: books.  Reviews, raves and rants on what I’ve read, and what I’m currently reading.

Anyway, I hope you’ll continue to join me on this journey.