What's in a gift?

This time of year with graduations and celebrating the 4th had me thinking back to when I graduated from high school. I know -- strange jump, but that is how my mind operates sometimes. I think it is an occupational hazard of the writer in me; spontaneous mental transporting.

My parents each gave me unique gifts which at the time puzzled me. First, my mom gave me a set of luggage. Luggage! Complete with identification tags and leashes for easy rolling. Actually, once they were full they became top heavy and fell over, so I looked like I was dragging a dead dog through the airport. At the time, I remember thinking "I've just graduated, so now you want me to get out?" But the message I read in that luggage now is "Go and explore your world beyond the one we've provided for you here."

That luggage accompanied me on two more choir tours with my church after graduation, to a semester abroad in London, England where I met my husband, and ultimately to college and my own apartment. They have been joined by more modern pieces of luggage with better wheels like rolling backpacks, but I can't part with them. They collect dust in my garage as reminders of my travels; where I've been and from where I came.

My dad on the other hand, gave me a cedar hope chest for my graduation. I did go to the store and show him which one I had my eye on, but I really didn't think he would purchase it and at the time, I didn't have a place to put it. I was a vagabond with luggage. What would I do with a cedar hope chest? So, it sat in my room at home, ignored for a handful of years while I drug the luggage around the globe.

When the luggage and I finally parked in a house my husband and I purchased shortly after we were married, I claimed my cedar chest from my mother's house. When I opened its lid, the fragrant smell of cedar brought me back to the shopping day with dad. I had stashed all my teenage stuff in there; my mortar board, doll collection, Mickey Mouse ears. They all came to live with me in my new house. I have added the sweaters my grandmother knit my kids when they were infants, a quilt from my dad's mother and college pennants.

Luggage and a Cedar Hope Chest. They still speak to me today. "There is more to be explored but there is no place like home." Life consists of both. The daily meal of errands, housecleaning and being with family is seasoned by road trips and vacations.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, as the Byrds sang some forty years ago. "To everything there is a season. A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to tear down, and a time to build up. A time to search, and a time to give up. A time to keep and a time to throw away." The trick is discerning when. I wonder what I will choose to give my children when the time comes for them to leave the nest . . . .