Office Hours

Darling Husband has his own office.

This sentence, in any rational sense of grammar, should not be a source of...well, of any emotion, joy or frustration, anger or happiness.  It is just a normal, random sentence that might be said in any of millions of homes across the country.

But Darling Husband and I have spent the last seven years living in apartments that were too small to even have a division between a living room and a dining room.  They were usually too small to have a kitchen that had more counter space than is required to set a toaster on, to say nothing of actually working in.  So, for the last seven years, IF we had an extra bedroom, it usually was bedroom/craft room/guest room/office/den combination.  It would be used for whatever length of time it was needed, in whatever capacity was currently the  most urgent.

Darling Husband rarely complained.  He just kept all of his personal mementos packed away, and patiently set up the printer on the dining room table, or spread school books all over the living room, or made whatever arrangements had to be made to accommodate our cramped quarters.  I encouraged him, often, to take over the extra room and make it his own, but just as he was nearly ready to set up a desk, it seemed something always caused him to put it off.  A guest would come for a few days. One of our kids would need to move home for a couple months.  I would be in the middle of a craft project which ate up the floor space in the extra room.  Something.

Well, in our new house, we have a room that is, has always been, will always be designated as the office.  We've been in the house for almost two months now, and 'the office' has looked like a storage unit, stacked high with boxes.  But this afternoon, finally, Jamie started unpacking.  His life has been quite an adventure.  He grew up as the child of missionaries in Papua New Guinea.  His parents later went to Africa.  And he served 20 years in the U.S. Navy, so he went to many other places on deployment.  Opening the boxes was something nearing Christmas for him.  Every single box held a treasure.  There were New Guinean masks in one box.  There was a bottle of water from a stream near the Blarney Stone in another, tucked in with gravel from an Italian ruin.  There was a bit of sand from the shores of Puerto Rico packed next to a marble goblet from Germany.  Another box held an African pygmy bow and arrows.  We found his antique book collection, with funny rare books like a book of etiquette from the 1800s nestled along side his first edition of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

So many of his treasures, bits of his life, memories, that have gone unseen, unspoken of, and uncelebrated for so long.  Too long.  I am thrilled that Jamie finally has his own office.  Yes, of course I am.  But the bigger joy is that he has a place to show off all those little things that mean so much to him, where they can be valued and appreciated, where his life, and all it's memories can be valued and appreciated every single day.  Because they are.  He is.  Today, Jamie is my everyday joy.