I usually clean vacant apartments after the kids are asleep in bed. While I clean I listen to music. I don't have a stereo or fancy speakers- just my phone, but in the empty apartment the sound echos off the bare walls and it's just loud enough. Tonight it was just me and Carol King. (and a pretty big spider that I had to kill all by myself.)

A few weeks ago we traveled down to Delta, Utah to attend a family reunion on my Mom's side. A lot of the reunion was devoted to remembering my Grandpa Fred, my Mom's father, who passed away 11 years ago. His death was unexpected and hard on the family and my Grandma wanted to make sure that his 57 grandchildren and great-grandchildren knew about his life. I'm one of the older grandchildren so I remember a lot about him. There was a lot of talk about his work ethic and I already knew that he was a hard worker. My Mom had told me that there was never a time she could remember when he didn't have at least three jobs. I could see proof of it when we visited. He was a farmer and I remember him always dressed in his blue work shirt and black engineer boots. I remember him coming in late from the farm. He also owned his own trucking company and among other trips made a haul down to California at least once a week. I remember the white index card taped to the wall next to the door to the garage with his list of things to pack and do before he left each week. At the reunion they passed out t-shirts that have a picture of a big 18 wheeler truck on them with the words "Fred's Fleet" emblazonned at the top.

My Mom helped my Grandpa with all those hard jobs. She was awake at 4 am to go farm before she went to school. She learned to drive an 18 wheeler and made many many trips with him down to California. When she went to Rick's College far away from her family in Rexburg, Idaho she didn't have a car. She took a full load of classes during the day and walked everywhere she went, then after dinner she would walk the 2 miles down a hill to the restaurant where she worked as a dish washer. She would wash dishes through the night into the early morning and then make the long dark walk back up the hill to her apartment where she would get the few hours of sleep that she could before getting up to do it all again the next day.

The other day a particularly harried tenent was in my living room with complaints and then out of the blue asked, "how do you do it?" He knows that Justin goes to school full time and works at the museum, as well as helping me with the apartments and mowing the lawns. He listed how I have two kids and take care of all the paperwork involved here and clean apartments. He asked again,  "Are you just super organized or something?" I told him I wasn't really sure what the secret was and then shocked him more when I mentioned our church responsibilities on top of everything else.

His question surprised me at the time but it's true, we've never been so busy, I've never worked so hard in my life. Kids, housework, scheduling, driving, cooking, paperwork, conference calls, maintenance issues, showing apartments, and dealing with tenant problems during the day then cleaning apartments late into the night.

But I'm proud. I'm realizing how life really is- there are no free rides, no short cuts. There is only hard work and integrity and working, really working for your goals. I now have stories to tell my children about cleaning toilets and showers late at night while my babies were sleeping to put my young husband through school so that we could all have a better life. I really am discovering that 'I can do hard things.'

Every night, as I put on my old jeans and moccassins and pull my "Fred's Fleet" t-shirt over my head to go clean I'm hopeful that I'm setting the same example for Audrey and David that my Mom set for me and that her Father set for her.