If you look at spinellasells.weebly.com, you might notice that it's quite different than it was a month ago. We are watching our life in Taiwan sift through our fingers, like the sands of a giant hour glass. As the end approaches, it seems like the sands are running faster, though we know that, at least in hour glasses, the sands of time always pass at the same rate. If you're like me, you may be waiting for that last moment, when you tap on the glass to make the last grains fall through. For us in Taiwan, that moment seems to be steadily approaching. Does anyone else feel like grabbing the hour glass and turning it over before the sands all run out?
These days each visit may be a last visit, each goodbye may be the parting memory. We can hang on to a few things, packing boxes on pallets is a little more forgiving than walking out the door with two suitcases and a carry-on. By the same token, we can hope to visit some of our friends again, either here, in Colorado, or who knows where? Maybe we'll visit with old friends in heaven? I'll leave it to the more speculative among us to make that argument.
But we are celebrating a life, of sorts, carried on in a little less than fifteen years, in this context. It is a time to remember and to grieve. There are seashells, bicycles, soccer balls, perler beads, journals, school yearbooks, pictures that will never hang on the same walls or in the same bedrooms even if we keep them, and even my "favorite chair." Note: My sister Carolyn has agreed to purchase my favorite chair so "it doesn't leave the family." Maybe I will yet sit in it in the years ahead in some other place, sipping coffee, reading, or typing away on some sequel of a digital appliance like I am right now. Perhaps she'll deduct the price from my next birthday present.
If you are a cynic, or perhaps a bit philosophical, you may be thinking that these physical articles are but the junk of a certain lifestyle at a certain place and time in a very long and relentless human history, and they won't even be wanted in a time and place not so far removed. I would say, yes, but... These are the tokens of our lives as we live them, and they ground us in the present and associate themselves with all the relationships, joys, struggles, challenges, and even prayers which comprise our human journey. And so it goes, and so do we.
We're leaving in a few short weeks now, less than a month, on 12/15, a date we are called on to recite to others almost daily, so perhaps we will not soon forget it. By the way, we arrived in Taiwan to live here on 2/28/96, a date we also still remember. How we have come to know this place in these intervening years, and perhaps even be changed by it.
So long for now, from a far side that may soon be so much farther, at least for us, Steve and Laura
PS Here's my current favorite Taiwan video link (Thanks, Peter and Luke!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMkhK5C6AfU
Da Yi Street, Lane 29, #18, 2F-1, Taichung 404, TAIWAN
011 886 4 2236-6145, wk 2236-1901, fx 2236-2109, cell 9 2894-0514
USA: 9685 Otero Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, 719.528.1702, cell 719.355.4809
TEAM, PO Box 969, Wheaton, IL 60187, 800 343-3144
<www.team.org.tw/spinella>, <www.team.org.tw/ccg> <spinella@alumni.rice.edu> <lauraspinella@alumni.rice.edu>
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