Forty

Forty.

A decade times four.

Two score.

One decade short of half a century.

The middle?

I hope not.

My time has finally come.

Faith I

When Faith was little and Stephen and I were only dating, she used to call him Stevie B.  He wasn't just Stevie B though, he was HER Stevie B.  When he and I were married, she stood at the alter on his right and held his hand through the entire ceremony.  She believed it was her wedding day too.  When we first discussed selling the house, quitting our jobs, and moving here, she was there for every conversation.  After all, she would be giving up just as much as us.  She was active in so many school sports and clubs, and she had a large group of friends and a great youth group at the church.  I thought as soon as we mentioned it to her, the idea would be shot down immediately.  It wasn't.  She knew right away God wanted us here - probably even before I did.  She was amazing.  She had a strength I never had as a teenager.  Stephen tells me constantly that she is "Just like her Momma,"  but not when I was her age.  I was a follower.  She is a leader.  I played volleyball.  She plays basketball.  I was a drummer.  She plays piano and flute.  I had a different boyfriend every week.  She has little patience for teenage boys.  She and I have always been very close.  When my mother was 18, she was recruited by the Secretary of State's office right out of her 6 week data input class.  She spent the remainder of her adult life traveling 4 hours to visit her mother and siblings.  I left for college the summer after high school, and had to travel the same four hours to visit my mom.  I only stayed away for a few years though and then came home.  In the end, I lived right next door to my mom before coming here.  I miss my mom.  I miss my dad.  I miss my sister.  Today, Faith got on the bus for her first day at her new school.  She was nervous.  I was terrified.  Today was another one of those days when I rethought every decision we have made in the last six months.  She is so much stronger than I - not at all like her Momma.  She has been so much help in the house this summer.  She has knocked down walls.  She has cleaned up 120 year old animal carcasses.  She has installed insulation.  She has run power tools.  I love watching her and Stephen working together in the house.  They laugh and fight and laugh some more.  I asked her if she wanted me to drive her to school this  morning and drop her off at the door right before the bell rang so all she had to do was go straight to her first hour class and sit down.  That's what I would have done.  She said no.  She wanted to get on the bus at 7:15 this morning.  She said she thought she would meet more people that way.  She is fearless.  I am terrified.  All summer long she has gone everywhere with us.  If Stephen was running to the hardware store or lumber yard, or I was going to the grocery store she wanted to go.  She tried to find people she thought were her age or may be in her class.  She just wanted to meet someone.  She searched Facebook for kids who may be in her class too.  Today she got on the bus and she only knew one person on there - basically alone.  That would have been enough to put me over the edge when I was her age.  Not her - not at all like her Momma.  She was fearless.  Excited.  Ready to meet new people and have new adventures.  The bus picked her up this morning in the same place where my mother and her siblings used to get on.  She was first taken to the school where my mom used to attend before being taken to the middle school.  She was walking a very historic route.  I wished we could have had her wake up in her new room this morning.  The insulation and plastic are up.  The dry wall is going up.  The kitchen cabinets have arrived, and the kitchen is being wired.  I would have lost my patience by now when I was her age.  I wasn't the most patient of kids.  She doesn't even notice we live in a camper except when the girls want to eat breakfast and she is still sleeping on the table - not at all like her Momma.  I think I would have said, "go eat somewhere else!"  But she doesn't.  She groans a bit and then gets up so her sisters can eat.  She has a very mature spirit.  She is smart.  She is beautiful.  She is kind and compassionate.  She is brave.  Nothing like her Momma.  Sunday she stood on stage before a room full of people she barely knows and lead worship.  I was so amazed at her courage, but she knows what she stands for.  She loves her God and is not afraid to proclaim it to the masses - just like her Momma.

The men in her life

When Cora Maria Taylor was barely ending her teenage years, she married a man named Floyd Everett Wilson.  She had grown up in southern Illinois her entire life in the small town of Brownsville.  She grew up poor.  In her pail at lunch she had turnip sandwiches.  She would smell the peanut butter sandwiches of the little rich girls across the lunch yard and yearn for it.  Decades later sitting at her kitchen table in her house miles away from Brownsville, I would ask her why she put peanut butter on everything.  She told me the story of growing up poor, those turnip sandwiches, and the little rich girls.  I wondered how poor someone had to be in order to not have peanut butter.  When my own father was on strike from the factory, he would stand in line for the free food in big white containers.  Peanut butter was always among the cheese, dry milk, and other things I thought looked inedible.  I think I disliked peanut butter for the same reason she loved it.  I yearned for the ham and cheese sandwiches, honey and strawberries, and packaged cookies the other little girls in the cafeteria had.  I ate hot lunch because it was free.  When the factory workers were allowed to go back to work, I still ate hot lunch at school, but somehow it tasted different when I knew my family was paying for it.  Floyd Wilson was born in Beardstown.  Both his parents died in the flu epidemic, and he was separated from his sister and sent to live in the Baptist children's orphanage in southern Illinois.  He learned how to farm; he learned how to cuss, and he learned how to smoke.  When he turned 18 in 1927, he had to leave the orphanage and go to work for a local farmer who boarded him. Cora Taylor was 5 years old then; she was just beginning to dream of peanut butter sandwiches.  Cora would get an eighth grade education before she went to work as a nanny and housekeeper for the farmers next door to the farm where Floyd worked.   Slightly crippled by childhood polio, she was very shy and self conscious of the results of the disease which had mainly settled in her leg.  But she met Floyd, and he loved her, and  she loved him very much.  She did not like that he smoked, but when I look at pictures of the two of them, she is gazing at him.  They married in February of 1942.  She was not quite twenty; he was not quite thirty-three.  Six months after their wedding, still adjusting to marriage, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and the world was at war.  And soon after, Floyd was drafted into the United States Army.  He would be gone for three years.  Her brothers would go to, and she was left behind to care for her aging parents and to find work at a local factory making the underwear the soldier's  would wear.  She had an apartment with her sister in town.  Cora and Floyd exchanged letters for three years - beautiful letters of love and war and longing, and how it would be when he returned.  In November of 1945, the war had ended and Floyd came home to the woman he loved.  Almost exactly nine months to the day after his return, my mother was born, and they moved here to 1425 County Road 1950 North to the tenant house on the landowner's 80 acres Floyd would work with Cora's brother, Chettie.  Five and half years is all they would have together.  In July of 1951 Floyd did not get up for breakfast one day, and that was the end of their marriage.  My mother doesn't remember much -- Grandma sobbing uncontrollably; the local ladies coming in and out of the house cleaning, cooking, and taking care of her baby brother.  There was no local funeral home, so the funeral director prepared Floyd's body in his home, and the service was held in the church.  He was buried in the cemetery just down the road from her house.  I drive by it everyday on my way anywhere.  I never knew him.  Uncle Dwight told me he was 6'3" and strong.  He looks it in the pictures.  I think I have his hands.  My mother looks so small in his arms.  I have the last picture that was ever taken of him, and he looks so happy sitting with my Grandmother and her children on the front porch - facing west.  I love to sit on the porch and face west.  I like to see where I'm going.  Today I sanded and painted the cabinets where she stored her dishes.  I imagine her working in her kitchen and preparing my mom and Uncle Dwight's breakfast after losing her husband - cleaning the house and tending to the farm and animals.  I wonder if she ever took much time to cry.  She had so much work to do - did she really have time for tears?  She was twenty-nine years old.  When I was twenty-nine, I had already been married and divorced twice - I took lots of time for tears.  Life sometimes doesn't turn out quite the way we plan.  Forever can suddenly become really short.  But, even in the darkest days of winter, a daffodil can bloom.  The Christmas following Floyd's death, Cora would receive a card from an Army friend of Floyd's.  She wrote to tell him of Floyd's death.  He wrote back and told her of his own wife's death from breast cancer.  She had left him with two children - a daughter and a younger son.  Their courting was long - five years in all - many letters and a couple of road trips.  He was in Oklahoma.  He came here - then she went there.  Then when my mother was ten, they married - Cora and Carl, two ten year old girls, and two seven year old boys.  Two more girls would come to complete their family.  Carl was the man I would come to call Grandpa, and the only man I would ever hear my mother call "Dad."  He worked the land side by side with Chettie securing the tenant home as shelter for twenty-six years.  Then in March of 1981, days after her 59th and my 9th birthday, he would die in the night in the same room where Floyd passed.  He was 72 years old.  It would be my first funeral.  I would wake to the sound of my mother sobbing uncontrollably in the kitchen.  My father was frantically throwing clothes into suitcases.  We would stop halfway in the trip so my mom could call into work from a pay phone - no cell phones in those days, and we had left the house way too early for her boss to be taking calls at the office.  When we got to the house, I remember how my Mom grabbed onto my Grandmother and how they sobbed and sobbed.  It would be the first time I ever saw Grandma cry.  The preacher came soon after we arrived, and we held hands in a circle and prayed for the peace of Grandpa's soul.  The ladies and the food came next.  People in the south know how to cook.  There were so many pies, the uncles plugged in an old RC machine in the garage, and we stashed desserts out there too.  I ate an entire cherry pie myself over a period of two days - except one piece which I think my Uncle Robert ate.  I threw up the night of his funeral - all cherries -- and a man I didn't know in a military uniform helped take care of me.  They laid me on the floor in front of the big furnace where I had seen Grandpa lay many times to play solitaire at night while we watched Dukes of Hazzard or Channel 14 news.  We buried him in the ground next to Floyd, his old Army buddy, and almost thirty years later we placed her gently between them.  Tomorrow I will work on cabinets again after I go to the church where she always went.  Tonight I will probably fall asleep again thinking about cement countertops and L-shaped kitchen layouts.  I hope one day soon, to have a few moments alone in the finished kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich, sit at the table, and cry.  But not today.  Today, I scrub, sand, paint, frame, sweep, build, repair, and mow.  Because with so much work to do, who has time for tears?

Putting it all back together

We knew it wouldn't be easy living in a motor home.  We are a family of five:  Stephen, bless his heart, and 4 ladies.  (Grandma always said, "bless his/her heart."  I guess I got that from her.)  The motor home is maybe 10 feet by 25 feet.  It's the kind you drive, not the kind you pull.   It is not ours -- we borrowed it from my parents, so technically we live in a borrowed camper.  That somewhat makes us sound like losers, doesn't it?  We pulled it to this spot in the backyard Memorial Day weekend, and we've lived here ever since.  We knew we did not want to use the toilet in the camper while we were working on the house, so a few weeks before we moved here for good, we came down and with the help of Stephen's Dad, my Uncle Dwight, and my cousin, Matt, we put a brand new toilet into a half gutted bathroom.  We fixed the plumbing to the point that there were no more leaks and hooked up outside water so we had a hose to run to the camper.  When we came down, we only needed to run the hose, open the tanks, and plug in our house.  We lost power several times until Stephen's dad figured out we didn't have the chord in a breaker designed to hold a camper.  But, once we got that fixed, we've had no more electrical problems.  There is plenty of room - to sleep.  The booth style kitchen table seats 4, and at night becomes Faith's bed.  The fold down couch sleeps both girls easily and folds up for extra seating during meal times.  The driver's chair holds clean towels, and the passenger's chair holds dirty ones in a basket.  There is a short kitchen with a propane 4-burner stove and small oven and a kitchen sink.  There are plenty of cabinets to hold food and dishes, and we've stopped using paper products to try and reduce our carbon footprint.  I do not mind doing dishes -- it beats the sacks of garbage the paper plates were creating.  There is a small frig slightly bigger than a dorm frig.  It has a small freezer too.  It was a problem for a few weeks, but my new frig came in relatively quickly after ordering, so we put it in the house for more cool storage.  Across from the frig in the hallway is a small door that leads to a bathroom.  There is a tiny toilet, a tiny sink, and a tiny shower.  The shower is about 12 inches by 18 inches.  It is impossible to turn around comfortably.  However, at the end of a long work day - the water is cool and clean, and it feels wonderful.  In the very back of the camper about 5 feet from the kitchen table is where Stephen and I sleep.  There is a queen size bed with two side tables.  There are cabinets over the bed to place clothes, and two small closets on each side to hang some clothes too.  Under the bed there is more storage.  There is also storage under the camper where we stick things when we need a little more space.  We do not spend much time here.  On the hottest days, I come here in the afternoon with the girls to cool off and rest.  I fix and clean up 3 meals here a day.  We watch TV before we pass out at night.  In the morning, we are generally up with the sun, dressed, breakfast, and back in the house.  We once moved from a 2800 square foot house to a 2500 square foot house and complained about really needing those extra 300 square feet.  Grandma's house is 1400 square feet.  The storage building currently holding all our stuff is 2900 square feet.  The camper is about 250 square feet primarily taken up by furniture.  Doing the math on that, I'd say we'll be having quite a large storage building sale before we move here.  We are so thankful for this 250 square feet.  The camper has a/c -- something we absolutely must have on days like today.  It is night and still 91 degrees.  There are days walking to the bathroom can cause me to break out in a sweat.  The house was usually a little cooler, but lately it had been almost unbearable.  The only thing to do was drink water and keep working.  But...yesterday was a historic day here at 1425 County Road 1950 North.  The heating and air team came.  We ordered our hvac system about four weeks ago.  Yesterday it came.  When I was a kid, Grandma had one propane furnace in the living room of the house.  The rooms were small and many walls closed each off from the other.  She used blankets to close off the doors and keep the heat primarily in three rooms:  her bedroom, the kitchen, and the living room.  The bathroom which was in the back of the house all by itself was always freezing.  She had an electrical heater that sat next to the toilet.  She didn't leave it on all the time, but it was a nice relief from the cold when you had to use the toilet and there was a heat source right next to it.  In the summer, she had one window unit air conditioner in the same living room.  The house was never insulated.  I always thought that must be an exaggeration, but I personally gutted or witnessed the gutting of every wall in the house and there was not one stitch of insulation anywhere.  After my mother's father died in 1951, my Grandma's brother, Chettie came to live with her, sharecrop the land, and take care of the farm.  From 1946 to 1951 Grandma and Grandpa had a coal burning stove in the kitchen which she cooked with and another in the front room of the house for heat.  My  mother said every summer, Grandma would take the stoves apart piece by piece and polish them until they shined.   After Grandpa Floyd died, Uncle Chettie brought in the propane tank and installed a large propane furnace and stove in place of the coal burning ones.  The heating of this house is actually why we were able to buy it.  Grandma's house was always cold or hot - there was very little in between except for the kitchen in the winter where she was always cooking, and the living room in the summer - right in front of the window unit.  I once woke up on a Thanksgiving morning so cold I went to stand in front of the big furnace.  I leaned on its big metal grate soaking up the warmth.  When I finally got warm enough and walked into the kitchen, I realized by little robe was too hot to wear.  Grandma came over quickly and turned me around and I had melted the entire backside of my robe.  Luckily it was flame resistant.  I once sat crying in Grandma's tub shivering from the cold.  My mother yelled at me to hurry so I could get my jammies on and warm up.  My grandma had heard me crying and had warmed water on the stove in one of her big wash tubs.  She came into the bathroom and poured the entire pan of water into the tub.  It was the best bath I had ever had.  Grandma always used propane to heat her house during my lifetime.  In the coldest of months she would spend close to $1000 a month to heat her 3 rooms.  That was almost all the money she had in a month.  There was no need for the landowner's to insulate the house.  Grandma was paying the utility bills.  When we moved Grandma out in 1998, she sold her big propane tank and had enough money to buy a small kitchen table and chairs small enough to fit in her little apartment.  When the next owners came in, they replaced the big propane furnace with electrical baseboard heaters.  When the third owners came in, they pulled out all the baseboard heaters and put a wood burning stove in the living room.  Still no one insulated.  When the third owners finally could not stand the cold anymore, they moved out.  On a freezing December day, they abandoned the house and took the wood burning stove with them.  When we came the following November, the house had no heat source and no a/c.  Yesterday a large unit was brought in and placed in the attic.  Another was set outside by the house.  I have lived in many homes with central heat and air, but the compressor seemed big and out of place next to Grandma's house.  The inside unit filled up almost the entire attic with its octopus arms of duct work and silver metal air way system.  But, this morning, when the unit had run all night, it was a cool 74 degrees in  there -- in every room -- even the upstairs.  And we still haven't insulated....yet.  Our final delivery comes Tuesday morning.  In it will be the dry wall, barn siding paneling, knotty pine for the ceilings, and enough insulation for every wall and ceiling in the entire house - even the internal walls.  I never thought the idea of insulated walls would move me to tears, but the thought of finally coming full circle just seems so historic.  Every time I walk in the house now, I yell out, "It's cold in here."  It may be a running joke for many years to come.

The Kitchen

There was no better smell than that of Grandma's kitchen.  When I was a kid I was amazed at how great a cook she was.  When my family would come for a visit, she would cook up some of the greatest meals I had ever tasted.  She cooked every meal.  Every meal.  Today, it isn't unusual for my family to grab a sandwich and chips for  lunch, a bowl of cereal for breakfast, and something quick for supper.  Grandma cooked every meal, and there were courses.  The plate was always full.  Fruit, toast, and juice with the cereal at breakfast - and at least one, maybe two vegetables with every other meal.  She always had a piece of bread too.  She always sat down last after everyone else was already sitting and eating.  My greatest memories of her are watching her in her kitchen.  When she died, I asked to have the big yellow mixing bowl where I had watched her mix a hundred pumpkin pies and where I mix mine today.  I think that was why today was a little hard for me.  We're working in the kitchen.  The old wood floors were found intact underneath the multiple layers of vinyl.  The cake layers were like this:  vinyl, plywood, 3 more layers of vinyl, 1946 newspapers which crumbled to the touch, and then the prize - the original pine plank flooring -- beautiful and barely walked on.  There were 3 bad spots which we worked to repair today - one was the corner where the previous owners left their refrigerator filled with food, shut their electricity off, and then left it sit for a year.  The second was where the chimney used to stand.  The third was under where the sink used to sit.  When Grandma lived in the house, she had a pump on her kitchen sink that ran to the cistern.  She had water to the pipes from the well, but the cistern water was used to wash most dishes.  She only had one large cast iron sink.  It was gone when we bought the house.  I bought a large cast iron farm sink to replace the stainless steel sink which had replaced Grandma's sink.  The house is connected to city water and all new pipes have been installed to replace the old copper pipes.  Basically, it looks nothing like Grandma's kitchen used to look.  Nothing.  There are days when I think we have ruined everything.  She would hate it.  She would think it was wasteful and unnecessary.  She lived such a simple life.  She cooked in that kitchen with very little modern technology.  I admit much of the gutting had to take place to make room for my modern appliances and vintage cabinetry.  Things she would have just shook her head at.  We refloored the entire attic to secure the area where our heating/ac unit will go, and as we did I couldn't help but tell Stephen again about when Granpa was in the attic and fell through to the kitchen.  There were always pans in the attic to catch the water from the leaking roof.  When I asked my uncle why the landowners didn't just fix the roof for them, all he would say was, "they  just didn't."  The just didn't.  The landowners didn't add a bathroom until 1964.  I asked my mother why the landowners waited so long to add a bathroom.  Other people in the rural area where we are had bathrooms.  The technology for indoor plumbing had existed for decades.  All Mom's friends had indoor plumbing.  Which is why I was so confused as to why they didn't have an indoor bathroom until 1964.  "We just didn't," she said.  They just didn't.  It seems to me that if you have a family which you have provided shelter for in return for working, planting, and harvesting your land of which they must pay you a percentage, the least you could do is give them a bathroom especially when they are raising 6 children in the house.  My mother used the restroom outside until her senior year in high school.  They all bathed in a big tub in the kitchen -- until 1964.  Our country had figured out how to put humans in space by 1961, but the landowners here hadn't figured out their sharecroppers and their 6 children needed an indoor bathroom until 1964.  Brilliant.  When I explained it to my mother in that way, she felt my anger.  To me there is no worse insult then to dehumanize a family in such a way that forces them to take their children outside to use the toilet 4 seasons a year.  I knew my grandparents.  They were 2 of the  most hard working people I knew - up with the sun and working the entire time.  They were good people -- they were kind and giving, generous and loving -- they deserved a flipping bathroom.  They deserved insulated walls and a roof that didn't leak.  They deserved to be able to pick out their own wallpaper and kitchen vinyl.  They deserved to be treated better.  --  I never heard her complain one single time.  Not once.  Each day, we fix something, and many times we will say aloud, "I wonder why they never did that for her?"  They just didn't....but we will.      

Hot and Dirty

I have never been so dirty in my entire life.  WE have never been so dirty in our entire lives - collectively, as a family -- we are just plain dirty.  Every night we shower - exhausted.  Sometimes I come out of the shower, and I think, "I'm not sure I'm clean yet."  Sometimes Stephen comes out of the shower and I KNOW he's not clean yet. We really just laugh about it.  There is nothing else to do when there are five of us and the shower is 1 foot by 2 foot and we have a 10 gallon hot water heater.  Most days we do not even want hot water.  It is hot.  It is hot.  It is hot.  The heat index yesterday was 114.  The actual temp was about 102.  I think it was hotter in the house.  Tempers were short, but not at each other.  We're one of those rare families that do not fight while we work together.  But then suddenly in the late afternoon a storm came in that cooled everything off, and I have never been so thankful.  Tonight we stopped working when it was still light out, and the rain was lightly falling again.  We played a little basketball and talked about the plans for the rest of the week.  The sun peaked out from behind the clouds while it was still raining, and we almost giggled while we shot basket after basket.  Today four generations of Humphreys worked in the house.  Grandpa H was down and spent the day picking up messes, Dad H worked replacing the old wiring, Stephen was putting the flooring down in the attic, and the girls had little brooms and swept up sawdust only to throw it up in the air and catch it in their hair.  We are seeing progress.  New lights are hung and the final order from the home improvement store has been made.  Heating and air will be installed next week, and then it will be time to close the walls back up.  Last night I sat on the front porch during the rain and closed my eyes against the wind.  I used to sit there often with Grandma.  She had a great porch swing.  It faced the west - my favorite view of the landscape here.  When I was a kid, the front yard was filled with trees that us kids would climb.  There were cows across the street that would walk to the fence when we came out to see what we were doing.  It is a little different now.  A house were the cows used to be; no more trees in the front yard; and, the porch swing isn't back yet.  I sat there though and remembered how much I used to love to sit here with her.  She rarely stopped working until the evening after supper - usually around the time Marcia, the weather lady, was about to come on channel 14.  She would sit in the porch swing and just swing.  I always tried to ask her questions, but she was a woman of few words.  The porch was poured in 1948 when my  mother was 2.  A man came and painted the roof underside blue.  He told my mother, who even though was only 2 at the time remembers quite well, "I'm painting it blue like the sky."  Who knows how she remembers that.  It is still blue - it will always be blue.  I wonder what of this summer my girls will remember.  My mother remembers little of her father.  When Grandma and Grandpa had lived here only five years, my  mother's father died suddenly of a heart attack.  He didn't get up one morning to go do the chores.  Grandma had cooked his breakfast, and when she finally went to wake him, he was dead.  He died in his bed in the room which will be our living room.  In pictures, he looks very tall.  I asked Grandma about him one time and all she would say was, "the only thing wrong with Floyd was that he didn't live long enough."  She was 29 with two kids and a widow.  She stayed in the house though.  She stayed and Uncle Chettie was there to work the land.  She stayed because really there was nothing to do but stay.  At the bank today, one of the ladies asked if we had thrown our hands up yet and called it quits.  I replied, "several times."  But, really no matter how hot and how dirty we get, there really is nothing to do but stay.  Once we found out what home feels like -- why would we ever want to leave?

The Cabinets

When Grandma moved into the house, she brought her mother's, my Great-Grandma Taylor's, cabinets.  A fairly modest set of cabinets by today's standards.  A simple 60" set all wood with a straight plain design on the doors.  All white with simple curved chrome hardware.  Uppers and lowers.  The lower cabinets have a cool bread box in one of the drawers.  White.  When I was a kid these were her only cabinets other than a homemade pantry in the corner and a small cabinet under the sink where she kept her wash tubs.  Sometime in my teenage years, she got a supplemental metal cabinet she kept in the corner by her washing machine.  Great-Grandma's cabinets were still in the house when we bought it.  I wouldn't call them white anymore.  Brownish really.  Maybe like a dark beige.  Toasted almond.  They haven't been painted.  I plan to save them.  Scrub.  Sand. Prime.  Paint.  If I soak the hardware handles in cleaner they should shine again like they did when Grandma used to pull them open daily to pull out a cook-book, a spoon, or the bathroom door key when one of us kids would lock ourselves out.  Today Stephen and I scrubbed the other cabinets we're going to use in the house - a set of 1948 vintage St. Charles cabinets we bought from a guy in the capital city who was gutting his own kitchen.  He said his mom hated them.  They are in the shade of Lemonade.  If you know anything about vintage St. Charles cabinetry, you  might think I paid a "vintage" price for these cabinets.  I didn't.  The man said he knew what he had, but just wanted to get rid of them.  After all, his mother hated them.  I was happy to pay him the cash he wanted and drive away quickly before he found one of the websites I had been researching for vintage cabinets and reneged on our deal for any number of better deals he could have gotten.  Lemonade -- my favorite color.  My favorite drink.  It took us seven hours to scrub within sight of clean the entire lot of them.  Tomorrow they go to an automotive body shop to be painted - something which is supposed to very closely resemble the 1948 St. Charles shade of Lemonade.  I think I scrubbed off dirt and grease that was first placed there in 1948 and never managed to be cleaned.  The original owners of my St. Charles cabinets must have paid a lot of money by 1948 standards to have them installed.  I imagine it was quite the modern kitchen.  Undermount lighting - built in range hood - fixin' to mix-it cabinet (you'll have to google that - very cool feature).  Today they sparkled again almost like new.  I can't wait to see them all painted with new hardware (the man kept the hardware; his mom must not have hated that)  installed next to Great Grandma Taylor's cabinets all sanded and painted.  When we pulled out Grandma's cabinets to gut the kitchen there was a dead rat under the lower cabinets.  We kept track of our kill finds for awhile.  It was a fun game Stephen and Faith and I played while we worked gutting the place.  We would work quietly listening to music and then suddenly someone would yell out "Mouse!" "Bird!" or "Rat!"  We also found a squirrel and 2 birds - close to 10 mice, and almost 500 wasp nests.  I said several times while we were gutting, "if Grandma had known, these walls would have come down decades ago."  We lost count eventually.  The job got long.  We began to get lost in our own thoughts while we worked.  Mainly I would travel back while Stephen and Faith traveled forward.  I am going there too.

Today in church a man spoke of his wife's death.  He imagined Jesus coming and sitting next to his wife on her bed and telling her He had noticed the good things she had done, but that it was time to go home.  He imagined this in his mind because one minute his wife was alive and the next she was gone.  When they found my Grandmother's body in 2006, I was told it looked like she was praying.  Later in her life - maybe the last ten years of it - when you asked her how she was, she used to say, "Oh, I thought the good Lord would have called me home by now."  I wish she was here.  I wish she was here to see how we are going to fix her house.  We'll make it beautiful again.  But really why would she care?  I'm sure she's got much better accommodations now.  If the Lord came to sit on my bed to call me home, He'd probably say, "what was up with that summer you bought this house and completely re-did it.  Man, that was crazy!"  I wish He'd come have a seat and tell us why we're here.  It's hard to explain being "called" to a place until it happens to you.  One minute everything in your life seems normal, and the next you feel drawn to another place.  The weird part about it was Stephen and Faith felt it too.  I may have been the first to say it aloud, but we all knew we were going.  We were not "home" yet.  I explained it to Stephen this way once:  this house, where we are now, is the only place I have ever not ever wanted to leave.  He feels it too.  Faith too.  We don't know why yet.  We just know we've been called home.