The Owl Trivets

     Last summer my daughter, Sarah, and her husband and two children moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina so Sarah could return to school for her advanced degree in Library Sciences. Her sister Amanda and Mike and I and quite a few other folks helped in the move. So many memories came to mind during that moving weekend – like fuses popping in my brain.

     Find the owls! I found myself saying this –  while opening boxes in the new kitchen.

     Back in 1986, just after Sarah's second birthday, we moved from Western New York to a rented house in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Within two months after that we moved to a house we had purchased in the next town over called Dewey.

     Looking back on it now, I can't imagine having gone through all of that – I had never lived anywhere else but the Buffalo metro area with its cold winters and short summers – and suddenly I was in 100 degree weather halfway across the country, pregnant with Amanda, and not only had we unpacked to live in one house but we packed up and moved to another where we had to settle in once again – and oh yeah, there was a precocious two-year-old to make things even more exciting!

     So one morning soon after the move to Deer Creek, I decided that I was going to empty boxes until all of the kitchen stuff was unpacked so we could start having homemade meals again. Sarah was fun company – she could already talk quite a bit, and she was a good helper. But not too long into the unpacking, Sarah started asking me to get to the box with the owls.

     I was not sure I heard her correctly, if she meant owls, I did not know what owls she was talking about.

     As the day wore on, Sarah got more insistent about finding the owls. I tried to think of all of Sarah's toys, but could not think of any owls that she had. The only owls that my poor brain could come up with were iron trivets that were owls – if I kept going through the kitchen boxes, I would find them soon, and perhaps they would appease Sarah until whatever owls she was talking about appeared.

     Well, you know, there were no other owls in the house. The trivets seemed to satisfy Sarah. For months afterward I tried to discern what owls Sarah had really been talking about. There were no owl toys or knick-knacks. There was a record album of Bambi – and one of the characters is Owl; and there was Owl from the Winnie the Pooh stories – could they have been what Sarah was talking about?

     Sarah's request made for such a cute story, that I told all the relatives, and that began the great owl collection. Over the years Sarah received stuffed toy owls, ceramic owls, souvenir owls from exotic lands – Poppee, Sarah's paternal grandfather, carved owls out of wood for her. There were pictures of owls, sketches, more books. Every July, the month of Sarah's birthday, the entire owl collection would be on display on the living room hutch. It was beautiful and impressive.

Sarah with one of her many owls

     Eventually, after Sarah departed for college and never really returned home again to live, all of the owls were wrapped and put into a box. And years later Sarah took the box to her home in Norcross – and last year she decided that the owls would not be going to Chapel Hill with her. Sarah saved the ones from Poppee and a couple of others that were extra special, and of course, the books – the vinyl copy of Bambi was long gone, alas – and the rest of the collection went to good homes during a yard sale.

     After arriving in Chapel Hill last August, we moved all the boxes labeled kitchen into the kitchen and started unpacking. I said Find the owls more than once – hopefully I was not too obnoxious about it.

    When we found the trivets – all was well.

    And all will be well.

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