Family Motto

My husband is interested in genealogy. As he is going through records and checking facts on the Internet, he often finds a family crest or coat of arms. These usually have a motto, sometimes in Latin, above a design. I have played around with the thought of what our family's coat of arms might be like if I were to create one.

I'm not sure of the design yet, but I know what the motto should be. I would put Pro Nunc in fancy letters above the design using animals, children, crops, roads, books, and churches.

Why Pro Nunc? Follow in our footsteps any day and you will understand.

After I have done a laundry, I take the clothes from the dryer and neatly fold them on top of the washer and dryer. Before I have time to put them away, something else comes up that I need to do. So I leave the clothes where they are Pro Nunc.

Recycling is big in our family but with the limited times we can take our materials to the center, many things are put in odd corners, Pro Nunc, awaiting the Saturday date that will allow them to be more permanently discarded.

When your husband is handy with tools, odd jobs are plentiful and always waiting to be done.

As with the laundry, often the job is not completely finished before another more urgent need comes up. As long as the faucet does work, the door does close, the light does turn on, finishing touches don't get done. It's OK as it is only Pro Nunc.

Often these things that were intended to be temporary become part of the ambiance of our home and we no longer even think about what was intended as the end result.

When Lester was still in the active ministry we moved every few years to a new appointment. That gave us good opportunities to start over with an organized household. During those years we also did not have the care of anything more than the house and a small lawn. That made organization in those nice large parsonages easy.

But we did have the land where we now live, and eventually a dwelling of sorts awaiting our retirement. That continued many of the Pro Nunc problems.

In a short visit to Vernon County some preparations for the future would be started when time ran out and we needed to return to our jobs. We would heel in trees to be planted, cover up structures that were started or pile up materials we had purchased Pro Nunc.

Of course we knew that when we really did retire and come home to stay we would take care of all these problems because then we would have uninterrupted time. No one would call Lester back for a funeral or emergency hospital call. My job would be right here handy and leave me the evenings and weekends to get caught up on the work. With all this time we would no longer be perpetually in the temporary mode.

Somehow this didn't happen. As we settled in we kept thinking of things to add, ways to improve what we had, and somehow all that imagined leisure time did not materialize.

When we look at all the Pro Nunc results of our projects, we know that this would be a true reflection of life to use on our family coat of arms. After all, we are only here For Now.