Bobeche. And too much salt.

I am ready to sort through more boxes of stuff. I've been making incursions into the middle bedroom for about a week and a half. The typewriter has gone to a homeschooling family with some of my favorite kids in it. My computer and printer are out in the living room. The keyboard is still in the bedroom but in plain sight. Eventually I will find the box with the cords and the modem. By eventually I mean "I hope in the next couple of weeks."

Kitchen progress, thanks to Fourthborn, one of the YW, and my own intermittent efforts, has been faster than expected. We'll work on it some more next weekend. Maybe to the point of clearing the counters and painting the ceiling? (That would be really cool.)

Meanwhile, I keep finding stuff to go through. There is a box of storage containers which needs sorting. A box which says "candles" that I packed for the  move to the penultimate apartment, seven-plus years ago. A box with candlesticks and bobeche (candle rings and bling) from the same era. Those are boxes which could transport items to new homes or to charity.

I have So. Much. Paperwork. I made a good start at digitizing it when I lived in Fort Worth. My computer, the one that 2BDH helped me put together, has two terabytes of memory. That would hold a lot of genealogy. And that, I've realized, is a major factor in this impetus to set my house in order.

Moroni may not be tap-dancing on my front porch (telling me it's time to start dating), but Elijah is*. And there's a whole chorus line of my ancestors singing backup. They want their temple work done. They want to be found. And I can do that a whole lot faster with home internet and an uncluttered house.

*Elijah held the keys to the sealing powers and passed them to Joseph Smith. Those sealing powers are what link families together for the eternities, through temple ordinances.

I said I would talk about the most recent temple work I've done. Five baptisms a week ago yesterday. Five confirmations as members of the Church. I did the initiatories for the three women before leaving the temple that day. My sons in law will do the initiatories and priesthood ordinations for the men. On Tuesday I went back to the temple and did the endowment for my great grandfather's second wife, who died while pregnant with their first child. And then I had her sealed to him.

I've grown accustomed (as much as one can be) to sensing the presence of the sisters I serve in the temple. I don't feel all of them by any means, and I've never seen them in vision or had them come to me in my dreams. But the ones who want their work done, they head straight for my tear ducts like Beloved does when he's nearby.

With the exception of my dad, I don't remember sensing the presence or emotions of the men as their work is being done. Until the baptisms last weekend. I come from a long line of farming people. Hard-working. Pragmatic. Not particularity demonstrative. Those guys were there. And they were feeling things. It was tender, and sacred, and almost overwhelming.

The same when I was helping Phebe get sealed to my great-grandfather. I've thought about her a lot. What would it mean to a woman who died before giving birth, to now have the ability to bear untold numbers of spirit children in the eternities, and to rear them in the presence of Heavenly Father and the Savior?

On a lesser note, what was her life like in mortality? What was her favorite color? Flower? Did she like to read? How did she meet my great-grandfather? Did she get along with his kids from his first marriage? Am I going to be able to find her parents and any siblings and connect her to them?

This work is real. These people are real. They are closer than we realize. And I  need to link them with census records and other public records and eliminate the duplications and get their work done.

But today I am going to content myself with sorting two or three boxes in a leisurely and orderly fashion. Baby steps. Sabbath appropriate baby steps.

(The "too much salt" observation relates to the food I ate while watching the Harlem Globetrotters last night. They oversalt the food so people will buy sodas and adult beverages. Good marketing, but hard on my kidneys, which were seriously unhappy with me when I woke up this morning. I'm going to be guzzling water all day.)