Our New House

“Hey, Gale,” Brad greeted me when I answered the phone late one early summer afternoon in 2011. “The inspector just left, and I have your certificate of occupancy. You can move into your new house!”

Wow! Our house was finally done!

We spent the following day putting up beds and moving enough clothes and stuff over so we could sleep in our new house and go to church the next morning. I'd been moving stuff out to store in Moe's shop for months, so it wasn't too hard to make the transmission. In fact, it was kind of fun to go through some of those boxes and rediscover my old stuff. A lot of it I hadn't seen since we'd moved in to live with mother after dad died, two-and-a-half years earlier, and some I hadn't seen since we'd moved up from the Valley in 2007. It was kind of like Christmas!

It's funny, though. Even though I'd looking forward to our new house for the past five years, I spent that first evening a lump in my throat and a sick feeling in my stomach. It felt like I was homesick! It was so quiet up here, five miles west of town, on our own five acres, and sort of lonely.

Probably I was just worn out from moving, but you know, I never really cried when mom and dad passed away. It was always like they were just gone for a little while on a mission or something, but not really gone, gone. Maybe that was because we still lived in their house, where everything was the same, they just weren't there. Now, everything was different. I don't know how to describe it, but I was miserable that night, but still happy to finally have my own home. Crazy, I know.

Many, many years earlier, when I was sixteen years old, I was given a very special blessing by an ordained Patriarch in our church. In it the Lord promised me that if I was faithful in keeping the commandments and paying my tithes and offerings, He would provide for my needs. That blessing had been fulfilled over and over again, all throughout my life.

When I was a single mother, with barely enough to make ends meet, I had needed a car. I'd just been offered a teaching job, so I went down to a used car dealership and bought a small, older station wagon with payments I hoped I could handle. The next day a teenage boy ran a stop light and smashed into my car. It was totaled, but by the time the insurance companies and the car dealership got through figuring things out, I wound up owning a slightly newer station wagon, with no payments at all. I knew Heavenly Father was watching out for me that time.

A few years later, after having to leave the new house we'd built before my husband walked out on us, my dad decided he should build a large, double home on two acres he owned in Gilbert, so he and mom and the kids and I could all live together. Again, I knew Heavenly Father was taking care of me.

Seventeen years later, when dad decided to move to Snowflake, I really wondered what would become of us. I wasn't very happy about leaving our Gilbert house, or our friends and family. But it gave Moe and I a reason to move to Snowflake, too, and it was the best thing that ever happened to us. Now I had the home of my dreams, due mainly to mom and dad and the inheritance they left me. Again, I knew I hadn't done anything to earn this blessing, it was just another example of the Lord providing for my needs.

So, this move, although it was a bittersweet ending to another phase of my life, was also the beginning of the happiest period I have known.

“Thank you, Father,” I prayed before going to bed that night. “Thank you for always taking care of me, for providing for my needs and my wants, and for making me so happy. I don't deserve this, but I sure am glad you have given it to me.”

And we have lived here, happily, ever after.