Blue Bins of Change

I have been feeling melancholy and down this evening on our drive home from Shippensburg and since arriving home.  We had a good time with family today as we always do when the Bradley family gets together.  There is always laughter, if there is one thing that I can say the Bradley family does well, it is laugh and find humor in little things.  I kept hearing Scott’s laughter echoing in my head along with everyone else and I kept picturing him hanging out with the family, teasing Emma and Jaelyn, talking with Fernando about some business venture, instigating a game with the family.  He would have really enjoyed seeing his mom playing Uno Attack and taking pleasure in skipping Deanna or making her draw cards, while taking it easy when play reversed and Jaelyn was after her. 

I find myself thinking about how different our life would be right now if Scott wasn’t gone.  I wouldn’t have predicted much change from what our life was like a year ago.  There have been positive changes in our lives despite Scott’s death and those are important because they mean that our life didn’t completely fall apart with Scott’s death – and he wouldn’t have wanted our lives to fall apart, that was one of the reasons that he planned for the future.  I have had a difficult time at times not feeling guilty about the positive changes in our life.  While we are moving forward and enjoying the positive changes, the grief does not go away.  It is shifting and changing, but always there in the little things.

I have been thinking a lot lately about one of the things he told me a month or two before his death.  Scott told me that he wanted to own his own business and work for himself at some point in his life and if he didn’t try, he would always wonder if he should have or could have done it.  About 4-6 weeks before his death Scott became serious about starting a business.  He did a lot of research and decided to try a business of renting heavy duty bins for moving.  Scott ordered bins, ordered business cards, fliers, and car magnets for the business.  He developed a website, set things up to be able to accept credit cards, and began spreading the word.  The fliers and car magnets came in the mail in the days immediately after his death.  We had already received most of the bins.  After Scott’s death I contacted the company that he had purchased the bins through to see about returning them since they had not been used, only to find out that since they were out of the original packaging they could not be returned, but that the back ordered ones could be canceled and that they had made a $2500 over billing mistake.

 I find great comfort in the fact that Scott was fulfilling one of his dreams at the time of his death and little did he know that all of those bins would be used to move us after his death.  I can say without a doubt that he had a tremendous idea and I cannot even begin to imagine how much more challenging the move would have been without those blue bins.  They made the packing so simple, organizing so easy – I was able to slip labels into pockets on the end of the bins that identified not only what room they were to go into, but also specifically what was in each bin.  I see those blue bins as one visible sign of how God was taking care of us and arranging things in advance to make changes easier.   Sounds crazy, but I treasure seeing those blue bins.  I don’t think I could look at one of those bins and not think about Scott.  I have to laugh at God’s sense of humor and I’m sure Scott is looking down and laughing – in Scott’s typical excess (when he grocery shopped and found a good deal, he would buy in excess – this is why we had about five to seven bottles of barbeque sauce after his death!) he took care of us in our move by providing 120 bins!  That said, anyone interested in buying some really nice, durable, stackable storage bins, let me know.