Moving on

Just a little brag to begin.

Remember this post?

The flower bed by the mailboxes is finally looking how I have imagined it should look. It has taken several years, but the perennials are filling in and there will be colour all summer long.

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In breaking news, guess who was eating unmentionables at my kitchen counter at eleven o'clock last night?

They're incognito, due to the nature of the food being consumed!

Charlie and Sam drove up from Southern California on Wednesday in a car packed to the brim and got here at about 5am yesterday.

It reminded me of our move in 1984. We had two small children and I was eight months pregnant with Annie. We had set our sights on Oregon ever since my first visit the year we married. We scrimped and saved and lived on air, it seemed at times, and as soon as Jeff graduated from Junior College we were ready. It was a crazy time to move, but I desperately wanted my midwife to deliver my baby and she had moved to Oregon some time earlier. So we assessed our finances, rented a truck, and off we went. Minus our bed, which was the last to be loaded and missed the boat truck.

You'd be surprised how much hand-me-down furniture a poor young family can fit in a two-bedroom apartment! The old ugly metal hutch where I had once found cockroaches I didn't mind leaving behind. Ditto the ugly greenish-gold velour couch that stubbed my toes every time I got near it. But I would have liked, in my swollen state, to have had a bed upon which to lay my body.

You should have seen us on the day we left. Jeff drove the rental truck with Jonnie, who was two, perched in a booster seat beside him. It was such a cute picture, his little face poking up above the big dashboard. Bethany, three, was traveling with me in our tiny Toyota Starlet that did not have one more cubic inch of empty space.

 My lovely Aunty Joan had given Bethany and Jon little bags of goodies to help them pass the time. I think of my aunty and Uncle Charlie waving goodbye to us that day and I am sure that Uncle Charlie's heart must have been breaking, but he never said a word. And I, in my excitement and selfish youth, hardly gave it a thought. Uncle Charlie was exceptionally close to my kids and he must have hated seeing us leave.

We left in the late afternoon and in my memory it was raining. Driving through L.A. in our tiny car was scary; every time a truck passed I thought we would get blown off the road. Jeff drove behind us, ever the protector, and as the hours went by he got concerned as he saw me starting to weave back and forth in the lane. He finally got me to pull over by flashing his lights and insisted that we find somewhere to sleep for the night. We had only made about five hours, but we found an exit where there was supposedly a motel and we took the chance. The motel was about 15 miles off the freeway! We thought we would never find it in the dark, but were glad for the rest once we did.

The next morning we drove to San Francisco and visited with some dear friends and stayed with them for the second night. We arrived at our destination, my midwife's house, on the evening of the third day. I often chuckle when we drive down to SoCal in one day, remembering our three-day journey.

We stayed with my midwife for a week while Jeff looked for a house in his family's old town.
And we have been living here happily ever since.