“Wouldn’t you just know it,” muttered my husband, Randy.We had already been driving for a couple of hours in a pickup truck that we had borrowed from a friend, and now it was completely dark.
“What’s wrong?” I asked sleepily. I had dozed off only a few minutes ago.
“It’s starting to rain,” Randy replied, as he reached over to turn on
windshield wipers.
Rain? In a few seconds, I came fully awake. If it was raining, that meant Mom and Dad’s furniture was getting wet.
So far, it had been my worst Thanksgiving ever. Dad had passed away a month ago. My mother had died seven years earlier. When I was a kid, we always celebrated Thanksgiving at home. All four of my grandparents had died before I was born, and to me, Thanksgiving meant celebrating holiday with Mom and Dad. But now, for very first time in my whole life, all thirty-four years of it, there had been no one to spend Thanksgiving with at my parents’ place.
Randy and I did, however, have plenty of work to do at Mom and Dad's house. A family wanted to rent it, and we needed to have it cleaned out by Christmas. Randy and I had been married for a little less than six months, and this was hardly way that I had wanted us to spend our first Thanksgiving as a married couple. And yet, I knew it was no use waiting. That if we waited it wouldn’t bring either of my parents back. But cleaning out house seemed so final. The end of a lifetime. The end of two lifetimes. I simply wasn’t ready. Although, if I were going to be honest with myself, I knew I probably never would be “ready.”
We had decided to take some of Mom and Dad’s furniture home with us. My parents' house was in west central Wisconsin, and my husband I lived two-hundred-and-fifty miles away in southern part of state.
After we had loaded first piece of furniture into pickup truck we had borrowed, Mom and Dad's bedroom looked very empty without dresser that they’d had for as long as I could remember. In top dresser drawer, my mother had kept some of her keepsakes, including a strand of blond hair. When I was a kid and had gotten my hair cut short, Mom wanted to save some of it. Dad’s drawer held a few keepsakes too. His old pocket watch, for one thing. Dad always carried a pocket watch. He had been a farmer, and he said a wristwatch would never survive hardships of farm work (dust and water, grease and oil).
