December 25, 2010

If you are a regular reader, it can hardly have escaped your notice that Budd and I are closing a chapter of our lives and beginning a new one. As I edited this blog to print out for my mother-in-law's Christmas gift, I felt a lot of emotions that I hadn't expected. Gratitude that we had this opportunity for a travelling adventure, joy about some unexpected discoveries, coming to peace with the notion that I'm not going 'home', and our hometown may be several hundred miles away from all of our kids and grandkids for the foreseeable future.

Once again, yesterday (Christmas Day), I found myself looking back. One year ago, on Christmas Day 2009, we also didn't have a tree to speak of. We were preparing to move and basically going into the unknown. Since we would be placing all of our possessions, save a few that we would have with us, in storage, our home was full of boxes. Decorating seemed not only futile but foolish. I took out a little artificial miniature evergreen tree in a gold flowerpot, with gold decorations and ribbon on it, and that was our tree. Under it were our gifts to each other, something small and practical, I don't even remember now what they were.

Our house had always been the gathering place. I always cooked the Christmas feast, and we always had the kids and grandkids open their gifts from us under OUR tree. This was tradition. Last year, all was topsy-turvy. My kitchen was virtually packed up already, just a few pans I was taking with me and one set of dinnerware left out for our last few days. We gathered with the other kids at the home of one of my daughters. That was convenient, as both of my sons were living there at the time, and all of the grandkids were there--my daughter's five, and my two boys' three. Only my other daughter and her husband were missing, and not for long. In a much smaller house, my four kids, spouses to two of them and eight grandkids, plus my son-in-law's mother and us, and for a few minutes his aunt and her grown kids, all found a spot to perch among the wrapping paper, bows and scattered toys to eat a dinner I didn't know my daughter knew how to cook. It was wonderful!

Within a few days after that, the rest of our possessions were packed and our two sons and two sons-in-law had made relatively short work of transferring everything to two big storage units, side by side in an indoor facility. We were left with just slightly too much to pack into my husband's '92 Ford F150 and my Buick Century. In a raging blizzard, we crept downtown to pick up a small U-Haul and arrived just minutes after they closed. I was determined that taking our lives in our hands in that blizzard would not be in vain, and finally caught the eye of one employee who was wrapping up the paperwork for the night. He took pity on us, and we drove away with the trailer. The next morning, I raced around to stores trying to find a hands-free set compatible with my husband's cell phone so we could be in contact while we drove the 485 miles to our first destination, Chinle, AZ and Canyon de Chelly. Meanwhile, Budd unpacked the pickup and repacked everything into the trailer, adding the items that wouldn't fit before. We set out for the unknown on Dec. 31, 2009, and the rest is history, as they say.

On Dec. 31, 2010, we'll set out again, travelling much lighter with just the Buick--we left everything else in storage last time we dropped by Salt Lake to touch base. This time we know a little bit about what to expect. We've lived in the area for a month on an assignment earlier this year. We know where to find the stores we like, a little bit about what neighborhoods are like, and exactly where DH's office will be-just across the street and a block south of where we lived in August. We hope this new adventure will last longer than a year, though we've both remarked how perfectly it worked out for the current one to last exactly a year.

And we both hope we won't get bored, staying in one place. Maybe next Christmas will find us saying, 'we really need to get on the road again'. We'll see...