Most of the Precious......

And so after a flooded garage the clean-up starts. Our car is pulled out and loaded on a flatbed truck.....a box with my neighbor's boots floated over and landed on top. Goodbye car.

We make our way down to look at our parking space and the storage shelves. The shelves collapsed, tupperware storage boxes leaning on their sides, golf clubs in four inches of mud on the pavement. Notice the "screaming" Halloween ghost......his face echoed the drama that occurred overnight.

I was thinking about the storage boxes full of our holiday decorations. I could see the ones labeled "Christmas" and they were near the bottom, on their sides. It didn't look good. Piece by piece we started to move what we could and brought things over to a flatbed truck parked in the middle of the garage waiting for the things residents wanted to save and clean. The throw-it-away pile grew over by the elevator. 

A few tears showed up when I opened the first Christmas box and found that our copy of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas was dead. This was the book Dave read to the kids every Christmas Eve until they graduated college and moved away. One year, up at Gramma and Grampa's house in Massachusetts Dave turned the reading into a rap song.....so we have lots of fun memories and thankfully photos of this annual tradition. But I wiped a few tears as I had to set it aside. The whole storage box was basically saturated......so most of the decor had to be dumped. 

Sloshing through the mud we went back and forth bringing things to the trash....goodbye golf clubs, goodbye shop vac, goodbye cans of paint. The next Christmas box came out and I took a breath before opening it. Dry! And right on top were the two doves that graced the top of our little Christmas tree every year since we were married in 1967! Dry! They were part of my mom's wreath on her front door to celebrate our marriage on December 29th.....so the fact that they made it through really made me "lose it" for a minute. All I could think was "this must be a full moon night....and mom was watching." 

We brought a box of to-be-washed decorations up to the condo kitchen and I began my efforts. Sudsy water, a hot rinse.....set to dry on the kitchen counter. Some of our favorites made it through their soggy adventure. I'll be forever grateful that the doves were fine....and the angel picture Megan created in third grade.....my cousin's Christmas card featuring a fat snowman.

Yes.....it's all just stuff....but some of our stuff seems more precious than other stuff.......