What have you been up to, lately? Me, I've been looking for my potatoes. I needed to find them because rotten egg smell has nothing on rotten potato smell, and I was afraid that if my search was unsuccessful, I'd be finding them with my nose.
It happened like this: When our son got his mission call mid-March, we already had a moving truck scheduled for later March, and would be closing on our old house a few days before the end of March. Then we had three weeks in April to finish getting him ready for the MTC, drive out to St. Louis so he could see his G'ma, and send him off to the MTC with a report date of April 22nd. Given that he was going foreign (Seoul, South Korea) that didn't allow for a lot of mistakes! The crunchiest part was of course before the move, when we needed to pack up the house and get the new place ready plus finalize repairs on the old place, and get his passport turned around, visa papers in, travel shots completed, etc. which were all due back to Salt Lake by the end of March or they'd move his MTC report date to June.
Thanks to good friends and the blessings of the Lord, we did it! But, on arriving at the new house, we found unpacking to be a headache. Most the boxes got labeled, but some were a mystery. And the biggest problem? You guessed it. We couldn't find the box with the potatoes.
Slowly I sorted through every kitchen box, even the ones with cookie cutters that I hadn't planned to unpack yet. Then I started on the random boxes, that might have held the missing spuds. As I unpacked box after box, my fear grew. What if the potatoes were in one of the storage boxes we'd sent straight to the attic? Would my house slowly fill with the rotten smell of stinking sludgy moldy potatoes all summer long? Would I blow the roof off with the gaseous fumes? It was a serious problem.
And the worst was that I really didn't have time to worry about unpacking! I had a son to prepare for a mission, complete with an almost entirely new wardrobe, a sick daughter to attend to, writing and editing deadlines, and a trip to plan! The situation went from amusing...to not remotely funny anymore. As in, the smile was staying upside down. Finally on one of our last days before we would lock up the house and leave for a week, we decided we needed to simply go over every possible spot the potatoes could have been put. As we did so, I wracked my brains for where they might be. I'd been in the kitchen when my friend packed that cupboard, but couldn't for the life of me remember where she'd put them. Finally--and yes, at this point we were praying--it came to me. They weren't packed in a box! A bit of sorting later, we uncovered them in one of the kitchen tubs that normally only holds beans.
Hooray!
Saga over. Or, was it? In a last scramble out the door we settled pets, turned all the suitcases and nearly all the trunk space over to our son, and headed off on the long drive from NC to St. Louis. It was a whirlwind trip, but just what the family needed. And on getting home, we had a pleasant surprise waiting for us. In my mind, I hadn't done any unpacking to speak of, and very little organizing. But that's because I was always looking for the potatoes.
The happy surprise? While looking for those rascally root balls I got the kitchen completely unpacked, and most the attic organized. On coming back, we discovered that our storage-space of a house had began its journey to becoming a home! And it was all thanks to the potatoes.
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