Hello! Did you miss me? I am alive and well and just a little crazy in Alabama, a phrase brought to mind because I recently unpacked the delightful book-- Crazy in Alabama, by Mark Childress. (One of my favorites, btw!)
I am having as hard a time unpacking books as I did packing them. So few books find their way easily to a shelf. Of course I have to read, and I end up stacking many atop the bookcases in my uncertainty as to which books I want in which case, or because I am called away to some other endeavor.
Let me just say that this business of moving a household nine-hundred miles is not an endeavor for sissies. There are also a myriad of repairs and remodeling. Add in moving one's psyche from days spent totally alone to days spent with a dear but lively two-year-old, and family and contractors and repairmen dropping in. It is a death of the old and rebirth of the new, never an easy proposition. My frame of mind is quite frayed. In fact, the frayed frame is all that is left of my mind.
The other evening, while sitting on the porch, (finally alone in stillness enough to hear my own thoughts) I realized something stupendous: I have not lost a single thing that I loved about living at my previous house in Oklahoma.
We still live in the country setting, four acres of a pecan orchard, in a house perfect for us, and the entire house has oak woodwork, much of it antique, brick flooring. My office, newly painted, is a delightful space, new and changed, as I am.
Next door there is a pasture with nine horses that I do not have to care for but still get to see and pet.
And the sunsets seen from our porch are magnificent.
I first began to have the desire to move some five years ago. I told myself it was impossible. The desire persisted. I began to think: Perhaps, and to pray, and pray, and pray, and to take one step at a time. Some doors closed, others opened. Things have turned out far better than I had imagined.
We have now sold our small farm in Oklahoma, will close on it in September and be fully moved to our new home. We have done what some people said we could not do. Something well for me to remember, and I pass it on to you.
Now new chapters of life are waiting to be written. Life is good, if a little crazy, in Alabama.
Blessings,
CurtissAnn
