You know what it’s like when you get a brand new pair of tennis shoes and you aren’t quite sure what to do with the old ones? They’re scuffed, dirty, holey, and in bad shape, but you just can’t quite throw them away. Those shoes have been with you for miles. And the new ones are so much nicer, but they don’t quite fit your feet like the old ones did. Inevitably, as soon as you throw your old ones away, you’re going to have a muddy day when you wish you had them back.
It’s funny, but my husband is very sentimental about old things. He loves to fish, and occasionally at Bass Pro Shop we would be browsing along and he would stop in the tackle box aisle and check out all the new tackle boxes. He had his eye on one particular box that had a lot of neat little compartments and drawers and smaller inserts you could take out if you were only needing a certain type of fishing gear at the moment. I noted which box it was, and bought it for him for his birthday.
That was in May. In August, when we packed up to go to the lake for a week with his brothers and the fishing boat, my husband made a confession. He had gotten out his old tackle box to trade things over into the new one, and he just couldn’t do it. When he really compared the two, he preferred the old one. It was still very functional, and he was used to it and how it opened, and the new one wouldn’t fit some of his most-used gear. Also, the old one has every fishing license from the last twenty-some years of my husband’s fishing history, tucked safely in a top drawer of his old box. He said it wouldn’t feel right to go to Minnesota without it.
I didn’t mind. I agreed that he should take the new box back to the store and pick out something he wanted, which he did. And he joked that the whole scenario should make me feel secure in our marriage. He would never “trade me in for a newer model”, he said.
So now we’re expecting a fourth child in our family this spring, and last Friday we went and looked at a bigger house here in our little town. The kids and I fell in love. It’s not so much that we don’t like our current house….it’s just the idea of having the extra space that we’re excited about. There’s a room for everybody! And a new kitchen and a full upstairs and basement. Other than that, it’s a fixer-upper, and it’s going to need a lot of work if we do buy it.
But my husband is not excited. He says we should just go on ahead and move, but he and the dog will stay at the old house. He’s joking, but knowing him, he also means it. He has lived in this house since he graduated from college. Back then it was his grandma’s house and he took care of her when she had a stroke, and for years after. When he was a kid, his family stayed in this house often, in between moving back from another state. It has always been in the family, passed down from generation to generation, and now it belongs to his parents. It’s two bedroom, one bath, and it’s been a perfect little home for us for ten years now. But it’s so full we can hardly fit into it.
He called the bank yesterday and is in the process of making an offer on the house, which is a foreclosure and might sell quickly and cheaply. He tells the kids and I to not get our hopes up. But it’s pretty hard to keep from hoping–and praying that it will all work out.
I’m not as sentimental about old things as my husband is. Unless they’re living things. We are about to have our two young horses come back home from their training session in South Dakota, and I keep thinking that we will have five full-grown horses to feed again…..that’s about three too many. But as excited as I am to have the young ones here again, trained and ready to ride, it’s the old horses that I am most attached to. I have thought about selling Daisy many times, but I never can seem to do it. The last time I went riding, Daisy was the horse I picked to ride, and I was so glad I did. That old horse has been a lot of miles with me.
