A Family History Mission: Expanding our Horizons

No. 37

Note: You can do a Google search for "A Family History Mission James Tanner" to see all the previous posts in this ongoing series. You can also search for "James Tanner genealogy" and find them.

Quoting J.R.R. Tolkien from the Lord of the Rings,

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

To paraphrase, it is an interesting business going out your door to go on Senior Full-time Mission, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to. 

In our case, we have been swept off into a whole catalog of new and different experiences. Most recently, we started to attend the Spanish speaking branch here in Annapolis and we were certainly swept off. Besides Sunday meetings in Spanish, teaching family history class in Spanish, singing hymns in Spanish and speaking in Sacrament meeting, in addition, we have attended a wedding in Spanish and the lively reception that followed and a baptismal service for the newly married husband and wife and all this is only the first week or so of our involvement. Even after speaking Spanish for over 54 years, this was the first Spanish speaking wedding I have ever attended.

Part of our new experiences are those that accompany moving from one city to another for an extended time but many are new and unique. Obviously, we have never both worked in an archive digitizing records, but after almost two months, we are getting used to that activity. But it is decidedly different for both of us to have the same job and the same schedule.

One thing is certain, the traffic is part of the overall experience and easily the greatest (and most dangerous) business. This week saw our first extended driving in downtown Washington, D.C. I am sure driving in D.C. is one of the major challenges in the entire U.S. road system, heightened by the fact that there are almost no right angle intersections in the city. I have driven in every one of the ten most populous cities in America and none of these come close to D.C. which has the densest population in the country and I am sure they are all out driving cars.

As to the weather, I think my daughter put it right when she observed that "It looks like they take every kind of weather and temperature and then randomly assign it to different days or times of day." The weather can start out warm in the morning with sunshine and then rain, followed by snow and by the next morning sun with warm temperatures. This is the first place I have lived in recent memory where the temperature can go up when the sun goes down. Continuing on with my daughter's comment about D.C. weather, "Over a few days this week, we had sun, clouds, wind, rain, sleet, snow and temperatures from 20 to 70 degrees."

We are adjusting to living in an apartment and having two flights of stairs to carry in all our groceries and such. We are also have figured out things like where to shop, buy gas for our car and get the oil changed. Interesting adapting.