Sharritt 2012 Christmas? Letter

Dear Sharritt Friends ,

The birthday is celebrated. The gifts are opened. The brunch casserole, biscuits and gravy, and best of all, sweet rolls have been eaten. The Sharritt's are resting on the couch, love seat and recliner; recovering from the carbo-load while watching Brave. Except Grace, she has broken out the pre-blizzard puzzle. We are dangerously low on milk, bread and eggs for the snowbound French toast blizzard feast. Isn't it exciting; a blizzard predicted for Boxing Day.

Our letters in the past have taken a look back; a look back at Ghana, engagement, off to college, leaving the farm, high school, turkey killings, truck burnings, leaving the school for the blind, Christmas trees from the back forty, leaving Purdue.  These letters have been crafted by the prior year’s activities and events. This year feels different. The past year was fantastic. The future brings changes. For the past four or five years our family has been stepping through the independence dance. First Ben and then Grace have been starting to make their way though the door that leads from our lives to the lives they will pursue. Two events will mark that passage with ceremonies of permanence.

In May, Ben will graduate from IU with a degree in elementary education with a special education certification. Watching Ben find his passion of working with young people, connecting with kids, knowing what makes them tick and having a knack of breaking down barriers that often exist between students and their teachers, is a thing to behold. I have seen numerous young people look at student teaching with trepidation. I watch Ben embrace it and run towards a finish line that he has strove towards for a long time.

In June, Grace will marry Chris Kozak in the wedding meadow on the farm. Much of the summer was spent cutting down and clearing a thicket of thorn trees. We would walk to the meadow on Saturday morning; a chainsaw in hand, long sleeve shirts and leather gloves. The battle would begin cutting off 10 ft tall thorn trees burgeoning with 3 and 4 inch thorns. After four hours, we would trudge back to the house looking like a hoard of cats had used our arms for scratching posts.  Grace would spend a few hours during the week dragging some of the cut off trees to piles for burning. We would spend the rest of the week removing splinters from various body parts.

Thanks to all of those who helped. It was a miserable way to spend a summer of drought. One Saturday morning was especially bad. The Sharritt’s had delusions of Tom Sawyer. We lured several friends over with the promise of Coldstone ice cream to help pick up some of the thousand of thorns that had detached from the mother trunk as they were being drug scratching and clawing to the pile of perdition. You can’t have the father of the bride wearing open toed shoes in a thorn patch. The day promised to be hot and it did not disappoint. No amount of free ice cream could keep us motivated. In the end, time and persistence paid off and the wedding meadow is nearly open toed sandal certified.  

Bev is looking forward to continuing her list of 1000 gifts. Through a book (with the same name) given to her by Nita Kozak, new friend and Grace’s future mother-in-law extraordinaire,  she started compiling a few gifts that she was grateful for each day, and sharing the list with Nita, then later, with more friends by email. She passed 1000 gifts a while back, but stopped counting, because she is saving her shrinking short-term memory space for things like remembering where she left her reading glasses. Some of her favorite list items from 2012 included these, with the early 300’s posted during her spring break adventure to visit Grace in Ghana:

#8. Roger’s arms around me on the dance floor at my niece’s wedding
#310. Chaos, disorientation, adrenaline, giddiness that I am here, and can experience this like a child, because Grace is telling ME to hydrate!
#320. Wedding brainstorming on the Kokrobite beach
#324. All flush toilets so far!
#384. Doing the first preliminary searches/calls for wedding places and food. Realizing how much I'm going to have to surrender my ego on this wedding thing so that I don't miss out on the joy. . . came up with the following strategy for modifying the sinner's prayer: "Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, the mother of the bride."
#435. Ben home for a couple of days. He used the phrases “working full time”, and “get my masters” during dinner.
#970. Sitting with my famous husband at the Boiler Gold Rush banquet where he presented the Sharritt Award
#1000 something: Talking with Ben about the ups and downs of teaching. His love for students he’s working with.

My passion continues for bike riding. Actually, it is a dual passion of bike riding and electronics. I had to ask Santa for wider handlebars so I could carry more lights and monitors. I have filled the handlebars and have lights on my helmet and on my spokes. It has gotten so out of hand that Bev has decided to stop putting Christmas lights on the porch. I just spend an hour riding around the house each evening and everyone is in the Christmas spirit. In all, I rode 3400 miles in 2012. It is a lot of fun, very relaxing and a little weird. Before this riding experience, I didn’t know that you could wear out a bike chain. I have ruined a few by letting them sit out in the rain, but have never worn one out riding until this year.

Grace:  Having arrived home safely from Ghana, I am now in a brief pause between adventures in my junior year at Ball State. In the coming semester, I will be busy with school, work, and wedding preparations, because in five months Chris and I will be getting married. That being said, this is my last year writing a paragraph for the Sharritt family Christmas letter, and you'll have to rely on my mom and dad for updates on my doings, at least until Chris and I start sending a Kozak letter. 2013 promises to be a year of great adventures and fun as Chris and I join our lives together.

Ben: Wishes he had time to write this. . . he is pretty busy with starting student teaching, finding that this includes daily covert operations and plans for world domination. Check out his blog to read about his year’s travels, and adventures in Kindergarten.  http://tedparty118.blogspot.com/

Years ago, at our wedding, Bev and I invoked the words of Joshua as he reported God’s intentions. “I know the plans that I have for you, says the Lord; plans for good and not for evil.” As a phase of those plans come to fruition, we are grateful. We rejoice in the good that the God of both Joshua and the Sharritts continues to give us, and is giving to Ben, Grace and Chris as their stories expand away from us. 

Love,

The Sharritt Family