Coming to America

It's been ten days since my grand summer adventure ended. I was hoping to have a deep breath, a chance to recover. And so far, it's been that. On the other hand, I've entered a new adventure for the time being. My parents have moved into a new house, and it's theirs. My mom spent my month away painting: her bedroom is blue (but she thinks it's green), the den is (actually) green, and my bedroom is a purple-gray. And she has plans for more. We've also spray painted my old desk, a chair, and a lamp. Let's just say that I won't be the next big street artist.

We've also received our last shipment from storage, which has been a trip down memory lane. We put all this stuff in storage in Georgia, so we haven't seen it in three years. And, frankly, we really haven't missed most of it all that much. My mom is cleaning out, and our garage has taken on the feel of a cosmopolitan secondhand store. Twenty-eight years of moving around has left us with quite a kooky collection of odds and ends, and Mom is weeding it all out. I've stepped in to save a few things from the pile, including a plate that commemorated birthdays when I was a kid.

Mom (confused): "You really want to save this?"
Me: *sniff* "Yes."

To be honest, I hadn't thought about in years. But when she brought in a pile of plates to keep, it hit me that one was missing. Honestly, I don't know why it's so important to me, but when she pulled it out of all the bric-a-brac for me, I knew that it had to be saved. I guess it's the tradition. For the Sheppard family, tradition has kind of been an elusive concept. I didn't realize how odd my family was until my first year in Georgia. We had to talk about our family's Thanksgiving traditions, or, if we didn't have one, we had to tell the class about our last Thanksgiving. I had to take Option #2. After five years overseas, Thanksgiving traditions had fallen by the wayside (if they'd ever existed at all).

But Option #2 wasn't great, either. Because on Thanksgiving 2003, three of the Sheppards were on a flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong to meet Sheppard #4, who was serving on the USS Kittyhawk. As the only forward deployed aircraft carrier, the Kittyhawk was gone a lot, so we seized the chance to see my dad. My Thanksgiving feast was an airplane meal (and if my thirteen-year-old self is anything like my twenty-one-year-old self, she didn't actually eat it). When everyone else talked about how they went to one set of grandparents for lunch and the other for dinner, I reminded them how essentially different my upbringing was. Cue the crickets for dramatic effect.

So, to condense the moral of the story, tradition isn't exactly our thing. But we do have little things: the red plate for birthdays, hiding the pickle ornament in the Christmas tree, and frosting sugar cookies in odd colors (my favorite has always been purple). My mother gives me stranger looks each year as I insist on following those childish traditions, but they also get more important to me each year. Traditions are constant, even when location isn't.

And yes, I will be eating my twenty-second birthday dinner off of that red plate.