March 5, 2001

Dear Friends, Family, and Subscribers,

We live in a large Floridian home on Lake Virginia, across from Rollins College, where I graduated in 1988 (but that's another story). It took me nearly two years to find this house, tucked away on a dead-end road that you wouldn't know existed if you didn't know it existed. If you know what I mean.

We had just about given up finding the perfect home, we were in fact ready to make an offer on an "okay, this will have to do" home, when we stumbled onto this place. It's not grand or ostentatious, but large enough for a family of seven and comfortable enough for a passle of grandkids (if we ever get a passle. Right now I'd settle for a bundle...)

The day we moved in, July 20, 1989, we noticed a medallion on the
staircase bearing the date the house was completed: April 1973. Mark and I were married April 19, 1973. With a certain thrill of gratitude I realized that the day our marriage began, bright and new and full of expectation, our family home was also bright and new, full of expectation, waiting for us to grow into it. The first stewards raised four happy children there, with lake parties and weddings and family gatherings. Now it was our family's turn (much to the chagrin of the next-door neighbors, who thought they were finished with lake parties and weddings and family gatherings next door....) Somehow, despite all the choices and twists and unexpected paths we had taken along the way, we had found our way to the home that was built "for us" and completed the month we were married. It was our turn for the stewardship.

Just off the front entry way of our home is a room that has filled many functions. Paneled in mahogany, lined with built-in bookcases, and sporting a hidden closet, it was Mark's office while the remodelers built him a roomy new office above the living room. When the new office was completed, Mark moved his books and papers and computer upstairs, and our son Tim took the den as his bedroom during his high school years. One night when I couldn't sleep, I made the rounds of my sleeping children as I sometimes do, not to check on them but simply to hear them breathing in the dark. (I don't know why. I don't do it very often. It's just a peaceful, comforting sound. Maybe all mothers do.) But this night, Tim wasn't in his bed. Tim had made a big show of turning on the security alarm when he came home at 11:00, and he had gone straight to bed. The security alarm was still on. So where was Tim? And how had he evaded the alarm? I decided to wait there in the dark. Not lying in wait to snare him, but simply waiting to know. An hour or two later, the top of the window slid down and Tim slid in, landing with a plop on top of me. Was he shocked! But somehow, I wasn't angry. We had a great conversation that night, just the two of us in the dark. (And I learned just how worthless security alarms are in the face of a resourceful teenaged boy.)

After Tim left for college, our daughter Lesley moved in to the den. A free spirit, Lesley didn't want anything that looked like a bedroom. We moved Tim's mattress out and replaced it with a futon couch. The den became Lesley's hangout, a place where she could comfortably entertain her friends of any gender. She added a lamp with blue bulbs, hung bouquets of roses upside down to dry, and added candles and incense that I wouldn't let her actually burn. (Meanwhile, little Hayley discovered that the mattress made a perfect sled for sliding down the tall circular stairs in the entry way--we transplanted Floridians are very creative in satisfying our craving for snow.) Even after Lesley went away to boarding school I continued to call the den "Lesley's room" because she was still young enough to need a room of her own, even if she only used it a few weeks out of the year.

But our son Todd gradually began encroaching upon the space. An avid wakeboarder, he found it more convenient to leave his board in the downstairs den than haul it upstairs to his room every day, and safer than leaving it in the boathouse. When he switched from skis to snowboarding for our annual Utah trip, he stored his snowboard in the den as well. And since I'm always the "drive-all-the-kids-to-the-beach" mom, his friends started storing their surfboards and wakeboards there too. Skateboards and board games also made their way into the den, so conveniently located near the kitchen, the family room, and the front door. Before long "Lesley's room" became "The Board Room," a name we say with a chuckle since it sounds so official and businesslike.

All too quickly Todd graduated from high school and went away to college. Now was my chance. I moved out of my little closet-converted-to-an-office and set up my computer in the den with its mahogany panelled walls and built-in bookshelves, so conveniently located across from the kitchen and down the hall from the laundry room. Finally, after 11 years in this our dream home, I gave myself an office. I still call it "The Board Room" (after all, I type on a keyBOARD) but the snowboard and wakeboards were now gone and I could actually vacuum the floor. I decorated the walls with a southwest theme and smiled each time I entered my tasteful, inviting, and clean! office. I wrote a whole book there this fall, graded papers, organized my volunteer activities, wrote lesson plans and corresponded.

Where is all of this leading? As I write this, I am once again surrounded by wakeboards, snowboards, a surfboard, and a skateboard. This morning when I opened my bedroom door I nearly tripped over a television in the hallway. Downstairs I had to skirt a duffel bag and a pile of laundry on my way to the dining room, which doubles as a classroom for high school seminary students during the school year. Dirty dishes adorned the coffee table. (The sink is spotless--no one ever puts anything there!) A mattress was leaning against the wall in the entry way. And I had students arriving in ten minutes. The reason? Todd moved back home sometime during the night. I knew he was coming, I just didn't know it would happen while I slept.

As my students arrived, I apologized for the disarray, embarrassed by the messiness. I decided to use it as an object lesson on the importance of orderliness, and how much better we function when we have neat and tidy surroundings. "Cleanliness is next to Godliness," that sort of thing. "Don't you feel so much better and more productive when you enter a clean room?" I asked them, encouraging them to be helpful at home and not like my wayward, messy son.

Then Hayley, who attends the class, put it all into perspective for me. "But Mom," she gently reminded me, "the mess means Todd is home!"

-- Jo Ann Skousen

email: jaskousen@mskousen.com

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