I See.. The Small, Hidden Blessings of the Big Move

We recently moved from the People’s Republic of Maryland to the United States of North Carolina. After almost 30 years, we are now the “North Carolina Taits,” not the “Maryland Taits.” This is our first move in 18 years, and it has brought us a host of blessings and challenges. We love our new home and surroundings, but desperately miss our ward family in Maryland.  It’s easy to count and track the big benefits; however, there are smaller, more hidden advantages that get lost in the larger, more obvious blessings of the big move, many of which are detectable only by the critical gaze of the Mormon Third Eye. 

The most efficient way to accurately describe what the Mormon Third Eye sees is through a comparison of two short conversations on the same topic: me trying to locate the spatula to fry some eggs on a slow Saturday morning:

Maryland House:

Me (walking sheepishly around the kitchen, as if I was lost in the airport of a foreign country):  Honey…. (pleadingly)  where are we hiding our spatulas nowadays?

Wife of my Eternities (frustrated that I have spent at least of part of every portion of every day the last 18 years in this room and still claim to not know where we store spatulas): It’s where it’s always been for the past 18 years!  Do you remember the last time you fried yourself some eggs?  Where DO we keep the spatulas?

Me (not realizing that use of a spatula would require me to first pass a test, and being too lazy to think more than 10 minutes into my own past):  Hmmm...

North Carolina House

Me (walking around sheepishly in the kitchen, as if I was lost in the airport of a foreign country):  Honey…. (pleadingly)  where are we hiding our spatulas nowadays?

Wife of my Eternities (kindly, politely realizing that she unpacked the kitchen in the new house without my help):  Oh honey…I’m so sorry… of course you don’t know we are storing them now in the drawer there right next to the sink….

Discriminating readers will have quickly picked up on the cataclysmic, momentous difference between both conversations.  The bottom line is that I, for the first time in the history of the world, can participate in sanctioned, ultimately useless laziness, and no longer need be thoroughly familiar (or as my wife would euphemize, “care about”) about what is where in the kitchen!  How cool is that!

I temporarily basked in the magic of the moment and wondered how long I would be awarded this privilege.  Hopefully I could take advantage of the moving-to-a-new-home excuse for months, perhaps even years, before being held responsible for knowing and caring about how our kitchen operates.

But if she’s reading this, probably not.