Collateral damage

It's great when relatives come to visit. It's great when they leave.

This morning I dropped our last guest off at the Birmingham airport and called Teri in Des Moines to let her know that it was safe to come home again.

We had a bunch of guests stay with us over the last ten days or so. Six of them bunked here at various times and many, many more were here to feast with us on Christmas Day.

Don't get me wrong--Teri and I love our family and friends with all our hearts. We love feeding them, sharing our lives with them and having them stay with us. The door is always open and they are always welcome.

In theory, anyway.

In practice, it's a little different. Teri and I euphemistically describe ourselves as "particular." Probably because we never had children of our own, we've grown fussy by degrees over the years. Our small house is filled with easily broken objects and we like to keep everything "just so." We're also particular about our routines of daily life. Not eccentric, exactly--just particular. When people are sleeping in your office and in your living room, the walls quickly begin to close in around you and your daily routine goes out the window.

When you cram a half dozen overnight guests and a massive Christmas banquet for twenty into our small and just-so world and then hit the puree button on that blender of humanity, the results are highly predictable.

Actually, things went amazingly well, considering. Everyone had a great time--especially me. I love everyone in Teri's family and in mine. Like so many modern American families we're scattered all over the country, so it was a rare pleasure for so many of us to be together at one time. Christmas Day was filled with joy, hugs and laughter, and I believe it was the best Christmas I've ever spent.

Teri had to fly to Iowa the day after Christmas for her grandfather's 100th birthday party, leaving behind a houseful of company and a thoroughly trashed house. She was distraught to be the first to go and would have gladly stayed home with us if she could have. As I write this, she's on her way back to Suburbingham and just checked in from O'Hare where she's stuck in an indefinite delay.

By tomorrow, our home will be scrubbed, straightened and it will once again meet our particular standards for orderliness. By mid-week we should be comfortably back in our normal routines of daily life.

Tomorrow, when we get the car out of the shop, we'll have the final total on the material damages wrought by the Christmas holiday. Don't ask about the car--I don't want to talk about it.

The most disappointing loss from our Christmas bash was a bit of bric-a-brac. When I was in Belize last year, I commissioned a wooden hummingbird sculpture from an artist and brought it back as a gift for Teri. It wasn't that expensive, but it was a beautiful and irreplaceable treasure.

We had the delicate sculpture placed on a tall cabinet safely away from small hands, but it was a pair of adult hands that broke it. One of the kids witnessed the still unconfessed crime and ratted out the perpetrator to me. Tsk, tsk and tut, tut.

But a broken curio and a car repair bill are just collateral damage and not important compared to the joy of sharing our lives with family and dear friends at Christmas. I never had the pleasure of meeting Teri's Grandma Kline, since that wise woman died many years before Teri and I met. Teri's grandmother liked to say "You should love people and use things and not the other way around." We try to live our lives that way, with varying degrees of success.

We're going to bite our tongues and remind ourselves of the words of Teri's grandma as we put our house back together. I'm sure by next Christmas we'll be ready to do it all over again.