X is for X-tra Melancholy

 

I am in the process of sorting through everything in my parents' home, and in so doing, I have been looking through all my childhood memorabilia, the majority of which I hadn't seen since my parents packed up my belongings and moved them from the home I grew up in to this house some 45 years ago. My 2024 A to Z Challenge theme is based on the treasures I have found in the boxes and the drawers and closets. Join me on my bittersweet journey back to my childhood.

My husband and I met cute: over the phone through work. He was in Los Angeles, I was in Nashville, but we were both from the same part of Missouri, at one time, living only an hour from each other. After meeting in person two weeks after our first phone conversation, we dated long distance, then married thirteen months later (me in discontinued shoes). I moved to LA, where we both had careers in the music industry. We bought our first house, had our first baby, and then realized how important it was to us that our children grow up around their grandparents, and we moved to southwest Missouri. Our son had just turned two.

The plan when we moved back was that my husband would work at his family's mortuary, which required him to go back to school for a degree in mortuary science. He then spent the next year living in a sketchy apartment above a mortuary in Leavenworth, Kansas, and attending college (again) in Kansas City, Kansas. Weekends, he alternated between working for the mortuary where he was living and driving three hours to Joplin to work for his dad. All of this, which included giving up his dream job in LA, he did so we could live our best lives, and I do not take that lightly.

Meanwhile, as my husband was sacrificing time with his family FOR his family, two year old Kyle and I were living the life of Riley with my parents, including going with them to the lake house on the weekends my husband had to work in Leavenworth. Kyle and I moved into the upstairs of my parents' house in Nevada, Missouri, but Kyle quickly made himself at home alllll over the place. There were toy baskets in the dining room and sippy cups on the coffee table (with a coaster, of course). My mom's tastefully decorated and neat as a pin home soon sported dinosaurs on the end tables and stuffed animals in the chairs and books everywhere. My mom couldn't have been happier than she was while we were living there.

We bought a house in Joplin soon after my husband finished school, and no more living separately! It was hard on Kyle at first; he was used to cuddling on his grandma's lap every morning, drinking orange juice and watching "Blue's Clues" and visiting his grandpa at his farm supply store and watching westerns with him. Little by little, we moved most of the dinosaurs, the stuffed animals, and the other toys to our new home, but some of his toys and other items remained at my parents' house (a year later, baby dolls and hair accessories and more stuffed animals were added to the collection when our daughter Emma Kate was born). Eventually, the kids' toys were relocated to the bedrooms upstairs, and there they remained for the next 25 or so years.

Now I'm sorting through everything in the house, deciding what to keep, what to sell, what to donate. Going through my childhood items has been a trip down Memory Lane; occasionally bittersweet, but more often fun and, occasionally, cringey. The baskets and drawers with toys and items that belonged to my kids? They get me right in the heart.

I was cleaning out the upstairs bathroom vanity, pulled open a drawer, and found these, and I got a huge lump in my throat:

It may not seem like much; inexpensive bath tub entertainment made of fun foam. But Kyle loved his bedtime ritual of a bath (where he would have stayed for an hour at least if we had let him), books in the living room (which would have gone on for an hour if we had let him), followed by three songs (because this, too, would have gone on an hour if we had let him) after he was tucked into bed with his blankie, his binkie, and his Boo kitty. That full year he and I lived in that house with my parents was a golden time that I cherish. 

You know what really got me when I found those letters?

The little teeth marks. Some were Kyle's. Some were Emma Kate's. All are precious.