Days gone by

When I was maybe 9 or 10, my parents decided we were getting a camper. It was a little tent camper that you towed behind the Country Sedan station wagon. It popped up in 5 minutes or less because all there was to it were the two pull-out beds and the floor in the middle.

We thought it was divine.

We weren't sleeping on the ground in a tent. We stayed dry when it rained. It was heaven.

A few years later we got a bigger pop-up camper, with a sink and an icebox and a table -- a real table! And electric lights! And a heater! Wow!

Again, we felt as though we were living pretty high up on the hog.

As we signed the paperwork today for our new pop-up camper, I remembered those days. How excited we all were. How grateful (yes, grateful) we were to have such conveniences. How my parents never made me feel guilty for wanting things, but somehow always made me and my brother understand that things took hard work, and sacrifice, and that we should be grateful for the things we had in life.

We didn't live extravagantly. We always had enough food, clothes to wear, money for an occasional movie or dinner at Happy Joe's. But we didn't have a lot extra. I didn't feel poor, but we certainly did not have all of the material things that many of my friends' families had. We did, however, have a close-knit family that (for the most part) enjoyed being together and parents who spent time with us. That was something many of my friends were lacking.

Today we don't live extravagantly. We like a nice bottle of wine occasionally, and I have a wonderful minivan that I am grateful for every time I think of it. Plus it's red. We live in a modest house that I love. We have cable TV but we rarely go to the movies. We use the library and the used paperback book store. Three years ago we could never have made the purchase we did this morning. But after 3 years of whittling down our debt, dollar by dollar, we are seeing the payoff.

And today, we bought a camper. It is set up outside right now. It is clean, our gear is stowed away in all the neat little cubbies and drawers, and it is beautiful.

My kids (and the dog, too) are so excited. And we are all so very grateful.