Forgotten

Yesterday I got all the storm windows back in place. Well, except for one. There is a window in a hidden area that has been overlooked over and over in the process of getting the house improvements done. There is a 21 inch space between the wall of the garage and the wall of the work shop. There is a reason for this, but it's not the point of this, so I'll skip over it for now.

Anyway, when we originally began working on it, I took down all the storm windows except for that one; I simply forgot it was there. When I remembered it and took it down, I noticed that several of the panes needed to be re-glazed; then I forgot about it . . . again . . . until just a week or so before the painter came. My son-in-law had done the other realizing, so I was a bit tentative about it, but I did a good job. Then yesterday, I went to hang that storm back in place, and I noticed that the window wasn't blue like all the others, and I thought, Oh that's OK; no one will see it anyway. Just before I lifted the window, I realized that the area around it had been painted with the new color, but not the window! Ohhh!

I called the painter and he will be out to do it in a few days. I told him it wasn't a big deal, and I understood about overlooking it because of my own experiences and its location. Too funny!

"The forgotten window" reminded me of something from years ago. We had a "forgotten child" in our family. Somehow Amber was overlooked so often it was silly. She was relatively quiet and unassuming, and it led to her being ignored a lot. For example, our dinner table was always full and busy with 5 kids, Glenn and myself. But none of us have ever understood how food could be passed the full cycle around the table, yet Amber wouldn't have any of a certain thing on her plate. She was not a little kid; she was in her teens when Glenn and I married.

We moved to KC in the first year of our marriage. Driving here was a real experience! Glenn drove a U-Haul truck pulling a trailer and I drove a 12 passenger van with a trailer behind it also. The kids rotated between the vehicles so everyone had a chance to ride in the big truck. With each stop for gas or to eat, we would walk the pets and rotate the kids through bathrooms and then load up. It was a system that worked. Most of the time.

On the second day we were becoming tired. If you've pulled a trailer you know how it adds to the exertion. We stopped for gas late morning, and I got my vehicle into a cramped place, so I asked Glenn to back it up and straighten it for me. He did so while I supervised the animal/kid activities. Amber was asleep in my vehicle, and I didn't wake her because she has a bladder of steel. I knew, too, that we would stop soon for lunch. So I was surprised when I came out of the restroom with then 4 year old Terri, to find a groggy Amber waiting her turn.

Well, Glenn had left my vehicle where it was in the way of other cars trying to get in and out of the station, so we hurried kids and pets back into vehicles. Glenn was saying, "Hurry up! We are in the way!" so I hurried up and we left. Yeah, by now you know, we left Amber behind. I realized it just about a block down the street, and we tried to let Glenn know. We had walkie-talkies, but they wouldn't work well in town with electrical interference. So I just turned around to go back, knowing that he would eventually figure out that we weren't behind him.

It was unbelievably embarrassing to pull back into the station, seeing a very scared 14 year old standing out front and everyone else grinning at me! I felt so awful! Poor girl took it pretty well, but it was heavy on my mind for miles down the road. Once we were out of town we found Glenn waiting, but he pulled out as soon as he saw me without hearing what happened. Scott got on the walkie-talkie and told Allan, in the truck with Glenn, what had happened. We heard a roar of laughter! I was mortified!

We stopped for lunch an hour or so later, and by this time, we had talked about it and put it in the "not to be repeated" file in my car. It was essentially forgotten. After parking, Glen and I walked to each other and hugged, our ritual at every stop. Remember we were newlyweds, and you know how that goes! After a nice long hug he said, "Honey, promise me one thing." I said sure, what? Still in the hug, he said, "Next time you leave a kids behind, make it one of your own!"

Yeah, OK, I deserved being the butt of jokes about forgetting kids for a long time after that! So embarrassing! I think Amber has forgiven me.