Hoosier yer folks?

When I was “back home again in Indiana”, (and, if you’re a native Hoosier, you’re probably familiar with that song, even though no one seems to know where “Hoosier” itself comes from)…anyway, when I was back home again in Indiana just last weekend to see the folks, I was helping them consolidate to move into their new apartment. 

Both of them are your typical Builder-Gen—responsible, frugal, forward-thinking, hard-working.  Nothing is to be assumed, (Dad taught me how to spell “assume”—it makes an “ass out of u and me”), and nothing is to be taken for granted.  Gratitude is a chosen attitude, and God’s will and wisdom are superior to mine. 

Yes, I know not to put my folks a pedestal, and I don’t.  But let’s be real; not everyone has had parents like mine.

So while I’m helping Dad recuperate from a knee problem across the street in a separate facility, Mom and my sis (who is local—thank God!) are sorting, organizing, and packing and sweating, with Dad and I out of the way. 

Mom did request, bless her heart, that my brother and I go through Dad’s old financial records (V-E-R-Y old) before she takes them to the shredder, not because

Who packed the pegs?

A husband in graduate school with three small children in tow—that was life for six years at Indiana University.  We lived in married student housing—what Bob dubbed “the finest in institutional living”—he went to school and worked as a teaching assistant while I muddled through part time as a nurse, sometimes nightshift so that babysitting was minimal, which meant sometimes sleep was also.   Graduate student families are poor, by definition, but again, that depends on whose definition.  Our bedroom was so small, Bob said that if you walked in and fainted, you’d have at least 60% chance of landing on the bed. 

I somehow convinced the man that family