on change

I love the memory lane stuff some of my cohorts are doing on their blogs. It's so cool, especially for me who doesn't know some of them very well yet, to catch up a bit on their lives -- get some insight. Keep it comin', guys!
After reading Maggie's latest, I was thinking about the night my family moved from a suburb of Portland to Ephrata, Wash. As Schuyler and Maggie can attest, no one in their right mind -- well, no one who has grown up in the U.S., I should say -- would be thrilled about a move to that area of the state. We sure weren't. It was some job thing of my Dad's (maybe that's always why people move. Yeah, okay). I'm all for him going where he's happy, and at 12, I was still at the age where I pretty much took change at face value, but yeesh, did it seem an ugly little hole at first.
We arrived at the homeliest possible time of year. Mid-January, after all the festive Christmas lights had been taken down, but while there was still plenty of filthy, gravel-encrusted snow shoved into the middle and sides of all the streets. Dad had found us a stinky little rental home to inhabit for awhile. Mom refused to stay until the walls were washed -- some SERIOUS indoor smokers had been there before us -- so we hung out at the TraveLodge on the main street (three traffic lights! YESSS! They're up to four now, I believe) for a few days. The wall-washing didn't help, but we made do.
I'll be blunt -- it sucked to be there for a little while. I didn't make many friends right away. I was rather free with my mockery of the small-town hickdom, and it didn't endear me to folks. I eventually found my way and have great, great friendships still from that time, and I learned a lot about keeping one's opinions to oneself. (though I still have a lot to learn on that count.) But what strikes me, looking back at it now after 20-plus years, is how necessary it was for me to move at just that point in my life. I had just started school at a huge junior high, and I was getting lost. Socially, class-wise, etc. I flubbed a math test by forgetting how to convert decimals to fractions (yikes!), so they put me in some bone-head class in the middle of nowhere. I was about to quit basketball. (in Ephrata, I ended up playing through my senior year, then went on to play for a team in Wales during my year abroad there.) It wasn't a good scene. But, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Ephrata was just right.
Funny how we don't know what we need, even when we get it, sometimes. But, looking back, we see God's wisdom at work.
I wish I had a photo and scanner nearby to give you a sense of what a pathetic little creature I was at the time. Har! Those were not my best years. At least I had ditched the glasses and braces the year before. And the afro-perm. *shudder*
So, here's to Ephrata. And all those little apparent hellholes that make us the carefully molded folks we are today. Or will be tomorrow, God willing.
*raises glass*