A caravan of memories

Three pickups, each pulling a trailer and the family van made up the caravan necessary in modern times to move a family of four some 350 miles from the gentle rolling hills of Nebraska to the wide open flatlands of the Texas panhandle. Lisa, Aubrey, Alycia and Luke left Nebraska Friday morning, and arrived in Dalhart, Texas in time for supper.

I "Googled" their new town and using the street-level view, slowly panned around the full 360 degrees available. North, south, east and west, nothing but flat.

Apparently fertile, it's good land for both corn and wheat, something our son-in-law Aubrey knows about, having been raised on a farm southeast of Stratton. The satellite image shows their new address surrounded on all four sides by enormous circles of green. The job should be a great opportunity for Aubrey. The children are excited because they'll be living on a farm and can have a new puppy. And Lisa is excited ... because they can have a new puppy. She's missed her critters since their move to Bertrand last summer.

It was a bittersweet moment, watching them pull away, knowing that the impromptu visits, a mainstay for the past 11 years, are now a thing of the past. And I must confess, there was just a touch of envy in my heart, because I know what's coming, and I know it comes but once in a lifetime.

It seems like yesterday that Danny and I struck out (this time with the family's full approval), for the wilds of Wyoming. Everything we owned fit in our Volkswagen hatchback, and once Danny was settled in at his new job, we settled into an alley house, for once just the two of us. No friends had tagged along. Family was hundreds of miles away, and Ben was still in the easy carry stage of gestation. We had no television, having hocked ours on the road back from Wichita, but we didn't miss it. We talked. Every day. About everything under the sun. We talked as we walked, everywhere, the car practically dead on arrival. Danny came home for lunch everyday and we listened to Paul Harvey on the radio. We saved our change for the laundromat and used the pay phone two blocks away for the rare phone calls home. We furnished our little alley house with garage sale furniture, one small piece at a time and counted ourselves fortunate that the kitchen table and chairs were already in place when we rented it. I got permission from the landlord to paint the kitchen, choosing a bright yellow with a brown trim. The bedroom curtains were in shreds, so I took wedding present sheets and stitched them into long curtain panels to replace them. (The last time we were there, we drove by our little alley house and the curtains I had so painstakingly hand-stitched were still hanging.) It was a darling little house. Of course, that is entirely my opinion. And I freely admit that my opinion is based on memories that bear the patina of time that softens most, if not all, of the hard edges of reality. Nevertheless, for that all-too-brief interlude of our lives, for the first time in our lives, it was just Danny and me. We learned to budget. After all, Danny's mom, always good for a 5 spot, was 500 miles away. We learned to cook. Fast food hadn't made many inroads to the wilds of Wyoming, so it was cook or starve. We learned -- how to live, with no one looking over our shoulders, no one offering even well-meant advice, and having no one to please except one another.

It comes but once in a lifetime. Some come to it early and some come to it late, and sadly, some never come to it at all. It is a rite of passage needful so that a marriage can become all that the Lord God intended it to be.

And how like God, to follow the dark, dismal days of Wichita, which were almost our undoing, with clear sailing through the crystal clear days of Northern Wyoming. The master silversmith, he always knows how much time his children need in his refining fire, and he always knows when it's time to pull back.

"'Haven't you read,' he replied, 'that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.'" Matthew 19:406 (NIV)