2WannaBRetireesinPanama: WHAT NOTS

Taking our realtor's advice, Ray and I rearranged some furniture in the house this past week. We did it now mostly because the painters are coming and will need a little more access to one room (the office was becoming a pig pen where everything got thrown off to), but also because we need to fill up the living room a bit. I think I have written before that my parents had collectibles that my sister and I no longer have a clue as to where they came from (and did we ever?). Perhaps from my dad's travels. Neither one of us share his love for the Orient, but we now have many artifacts from the Far East. When moving a shelving unit (that also looks like it is Asian) with all of these big and small "what nots" stored on it, I told Ray there were a few things I had to bring to Panama. These are the things, especially the turtles, I remember my dad straightening out in the shadow boxes and on the shelves (with his undiagnosed OCD disorder, but we teased him about it stating he passed it on to me haha). These are just a few of things that I remember my mom complaining about with all the dusting she had to do (maybe she maybe them crooked on purpose). My dad was a meticulous straightener. He was not a duster.

The blue bottles are a totally different memory. I was in fifth grade, and my school was having a fundraiser around the holidays. My mom, the previous summer, had been injured in a car accident and was not having a good year at all. We had just moved into a new house, and my parents had the main level half bathroom decorated in a red, white and blue scheme. I wanted to buy the blue bottles for fifty cents, and my dad criticized me for it. Why would I want to spend my $5 on fifty cent blue bottles? I wanted to help decorate the bathroom for my mom (I was nine years old). So I bought them and gave them to her for a Christmas gift. They, too, collected dust on a glass shelf that was mounted over the toilet in the bathroom. For years and years, they sat there. The tiny polka-dotted wallpaper came down eventually, but the blue bottles still stayed on the shelf (I forget what the new color scheme was). Then one day, when I was away at college, my mom called me to tell me that while my dad was, I think, changing the innards of the toilet (or trying to fix it somehow), he lifted his head up and bumped it into the glass shelf. A bottle came down and broke. After years of him straightening the bottles, and after years of my mom dusting them, he broke one tall one and the lid of a short one. He was devastated. We had, for years, talked about how he admonished me for wanting to spend my money on blue bottles. And yet those bottles were the best gift ever! They came with a great story and a great memory. And when he broke one, he was so sad. So he moved the bottles to the ledges of the window in the kitchen. It made sense. The kitchen was now red, white and blue, and the bottles caught the light of the sun. And dad didn't straighten them as much, but he could see them everyday. So those blue bottles go with me to Panama, too.

Another thing we found in the office was the empty box to my laptop. The blue bottles might be too wide for the box, but you can bet there will be another box just for them. This is where I will bundle up these small figurines, pack them tightly with bubble wrap, and hope they make it to Panama safe in my suitcase.