Frozen Numbers

It was surprising news to wake up to on a Monday morning. After almost a decade of hunting for him, the mastermind behind the destruction of the World Trade Center had been found and murdered. Swirled into the constant updates on the situation were references to the attacks on our country, that occurred almost a decade ago. That news was almost as hard to believe as the assassination news itself. Ten years. It’s been ten years since we turned on our TVs to find out that our country had been attacked.

I remember it like it was yesterday, as does almost anyone who was over the age of ten when it happened. But the anniversary date has come, year after year, and life has raced ahead in between. If given a minute, I could always tell you exactly how many years it’s been, but I never had the number as a constant in my head. Heck, I have to do some mental math just to tell you how old my own children are, at any given time.

It led to me ponder how some numbers are slippery but others become frozen in time, especially when tragedy strikes. We are about to celebrate another Mother’s Day. It’s my nineteenth time to enjoy the honor. That’s easy math. My daughter’s birth ushered me into this sacred position. But every year I also do some other math. Without wanting to, my mind always, without fail, stops to calculate how many years I’ve had to celebrate without needing to buy a card for my own mother.

She died almost seventeen years ago. This will be my sixteenth year of missing her on a day I want to pamper her. The sixteenth year that I’ll walk by the aisles of Mother’s Day gifts as I make my way to the section of graveside flowers for Memorial Day. The irony catches in my stomach every single year.

To be honest, I had to stop and do the math on that last paragraph. My daughter was born in 92, my son in 93 ,and she died in 1994. Quick math gives me a seventeen. But another number is burned into my memory. I don’t have to do any math to come up with it. A big five and a zero. She was 50 when she died.

A night of country dancing, as she powered through a terrible headache, ended in the ICU, with a stroke that eventually took her life. In the shock and grief that followed, the number fifty was seared into my brain. It seemed like an ‘older person’ age, although I felt way too young to be without her. And every year that has brought me closer to that number myself, helps me to see just how young she really was.

I have a personal tradition, to ease my own longing for my mom. Every Mother’s Day I send a card to a woman I’ve never met. She lived in my neighborhood when, just two years after I lost my mom, she lost both of her daughters on TWA flight 800. In one fell swoop she lost all of her children. Their plane crashed on the month after I gave birth to my third child.

My house was full of life and little people, and hers was suddenly, permanently quiet.

The next time a Mother’s Day rolled around I thought of her, and how her heart must be aching also. So I sent her a card, and my heart felt better.

Every year since I’ve repeated the gesture. We’ve exchanged holiday cards and she usually sends me follow up cards, in the weeks after Mother’s Day, but we’ve never met. That doesn’t mean I don’t think about her, when I’m pondering this crazy thing called grief.

I’m sure she has a couple of numbers seared into her own brain. The numbers 25 and 28. That’s where her daughter’s lives ended. At ages 25 and 28. They will never be 26 and 29. Just like my mom will never be 51. Those numbers will forever be frozen in time.

I’m sure almost everyone you meet has a frozen number or two in their brain. The grade they were in school when their father died. The year they lost a baby to miscarriage. The day their spouse asked for a divorce. We all walk around with some number imprinted on our soul.

Today I plan to put a special card in the mail to my mother in law, my stepmom, and the friend I’ve never met. Then I’ll wait for Sunday to roll around, and I’ll enjoy the day with my own children. Because for as much as I miss my own mom on that day, I never take for granted the gifts I have living under my own roof.

Our family is still very much full of life and love and new memories. Every year my children are growing, and changing, and becoming new people. No frozen numbers here.

Mother’s Day can be a time of reflection, but it’s also, very much, a time to treasure the numbers that continue on.

A Family Path

I sat down today to write this week’s column and nothing came. Some weeks I have a dozen ideas circling around my head, begging to be the topic of the week. Other weeks, it’s more slim pickings. This week, it was downright anemic.

It might be in part because my brain is otherwise occupied. In less than 12 hours a rental car will pull out of my driveway and will head West. For three days we’ll drive, then for three days we’ll explore the mountains of Colorado, and finally, for three days we’ll drive back. As the mom, if anything is forgotten along the way, it will always be my fault. So as the stack of ‘must takes’ slowly grew on the kitchen table (including, but not limited to video gaming devices, iPods, sunglasses, Sudoku books, drawing pads, granola bars, assorted chargers, and a fully charged camera), I suddenly had to slam on the brakes of my rattled brain and come up with something to write about this week.

When the afternoon started slipping away, still with no ideas, I resisted the urge to panic. Then my middle son walked through the door. His school day was over, but my writing day had just begun. I sat for a few minutes and listened to his latest stories from the halls of the high school, then I sighed deeply and told him I needed his help. I told him I needed an idea, something exciting to write about this week. I warned him that I felt like people were probably tired of hearing about our move, so what other topics did he think might interest readers?

He didn’t hesitate to offer his advice. “How ‘bout you tell them how you’re going to stuff your three kids into the back seat of a car, and make them suffer for three whole days?” You see, my boy is upset that we’re not renting a minivan for this cross country trip. The last time we drove that far, he had lots of room to spread out. But this time, we’re only taking three of the kids, and we figured we’d save some money (almost eight hundred dollars, to be exact) by getting a large car, instead of a van.

I’m fairly confident that he’ll survive. Heck, he might even have some fun. I’ve tried telling him this fact, but he’s currently under the teen spell of filtered hearing and all he can process is that he has to share breathing air with two brothers, for six days of total driving time.

But that same teen spell also prevents him from remembering the things his mom remembers. I was sorting through some old pictures the other day, and I got lost in a bad case of nostalgia. There on my screen were hundreds of snippets of memories, pockets of time that we got to block out the world and spend time with just the six of us. No ringing phones or work obligations to distract us. The open road was our path to family bonding. I was reminded, by the snapshot after snapshot of smiles, of just how much fun it is to just be ‘us’ for a bit.

The interesting thing is that the family dynamic changes with each trip. As my children age, and slowly turn into the people they are going to become, they go through personality spells. On one trip the littlest one will bond with his only sister. They’ll split sandwiches at Subway and share the headphone splitters on the DVD player. On the next trip he might latch onto his oldest brother, making their own special memories along the way.

The sad part about this trip to me is that our magical window is closing. This is our first big trip without one of our children. Job obligations are keeping my girl home. We’re down to three boys. In just a few short months, as my son heads off to college, we’ll suddenly be down to only two boys in the house. Only two boys to share the backseat and the booth at the diner. The pattern of our family, and our family trips, is changing.

I look forward to the next ten days. I know there will be conflicts. If three brothers could travel two thousand miles together and not fight once, it would concern me. But I know my gang. We’ll also laugh a lot. We’ll see some crazy sign on the side of the highway, for some weird truck stop or fudge warehouse, and we’ll beg dad to stop. If the pleas don’t work, someone will fake a bathroom emergency. Because, no matter what, we’ll get our fudge and buy that old fashioned rubber band gun.

We’ll stop in big cities and small towns. We’ll count down the mileage signs, as we get close to places the kids have heard about on TV. And then, when we finally arrive in Indianapolis, and Chicago, we’ll make the kids put down their distractions (“headphones OUT!”) and pretend to gaze at the city, from our highway view at 65 miles an hour. Then, for the four thousandth time, we’ll discuss whether driving by a major city counts as having ‘been there’.

Today it’s all ahead of us. I’m trusting that the rental car will be ready for us in the morning, and all my planning will pay off. If this trip turns out like the ones in the past, in a blink of an eye I’ll be back at this screen, our trip over, the bags unpacked, and I’ll wonder just where the time went. So if you run into my middle son, and he tries to complain to you, about how his mother must not care about him because she forced him to (gasp!) share a car seat with his brothers, do me a favor.

Ask him if he’s had any good fudge lately.

Eye on the Prize

The other day I told my husband that the details of this cross-country move we’re about to make sometimes make me feel like I’m in the middle of a difficult pregnancy. I get so tied up with the anguish in the middle that I forget about the baby we’ll see on the other end.

When we first realized we’d like to settle long term in Colorado all I could think about was the ‘baby’ - the amazing scenery we could call our backyard, the dry climate that would remedy some of our health issues, and the wide variety of National Parks we’d be able to explore on long weekends. After a long, winding road of events, the job finally came through. That western state would be our new home. But suddenly the pictures of the baby slipped from my mind.

In almost an instant the lists began to form. There were so many things that needed to be done, to get our family uprooted from this home we’ve had in New York for a handful of years. Colorado was no longer in the forefront of my thoughts. New York was. The things we loved about New York and the things that needed to be done before we could walk away from this East coast life.

Of course getting the house on the market was a top priority. All of those ‘let’s finish some day’ projects had to be done, today. We did major updates when we moved here, but a family of six can be hard on a house, especially when that family includes three active boys. There were finger prints to wash off every light switch and dings to repair in bedroom walls.

We’ve watched the shows on HGTV. We knew all those fun colors that the kids picked for their bedroom walls would have to be made more buyer friendly. The ceilings, which were the only surfaces not to be changed when we moved in, finally needed a nice coat of paint. The bathrooms got simple updates, with new flooring, fixtures and bead board. One of my friends wisely commented, “It’s like you’re doing every HGTV show, all at once!”

I’m sure my Facebook friends are tired of hearing about it. I’ve been scattered and weary for the past few weeks. The silver lining has surely been the visitors we’ve had the past two weekends. A week ago we spent some quality time with my mother in law and father in law, as they helped us clip away at our lists. Then this past weekend my handy brother in law, and his wife, blessed us with their home repair skills also. The irony for them is that the memories we’re making are just propelling us closer to a move far away from them.

Besides the undying support of wonderful in-laws, the other thing that keeps me sane is the little snapshots of what’s coming in our new life. Just when I’m getting caught up in the chaos of my current home life, I get a blast of fresh encouragement. The other day it was a man and his young daughter, checking out books about the National Parks in the west. They were planning a family trip there and wanted to do some research.

As I scanned the book’s bar codes and slipped the due date cards in their slots, a comment slipped out of my mouth. “I’m moving out west in a few months. I’ll live right next to these parks.” The little girl’s eyes grew wide. Her dad graciously replied, “That’s really great! Good luck with your move.” It hit me again. I’m moving. To a place that’s in the shadow of those amazing parks. Don’t forget the image of the baby.

Then a significant date arrived on the calendar. My dad’s birthday was Sunday. I sent him a card and then an email, but it’s been way too long since I’ve given him a hug. In the five years since we’ve lived in New York, he’s been able to come see us just twice. We’ve traveled back to his house in Missouri just once. I’ve seen my dad (and my kids have seen their maternal grandmother and grandfather) just three times in five years. That fact hurts my heart.

He and my stepmom volunteer at a YMCA camp in Colorado every autumn. I’ll get to see them every year once we live there. At least once a year - maybe even more. My siblings in the western part of the country will become more familiar to my children too. My crazy little brother, who has always been able to make me laugh, will be able to drive to my house in just over a day. His son, who’s growing up way too quickly, will soon have active memories of his Aunt Judy. The same can be said for most of my other nephews and nieces, the children of my own siblings.

It will be very difficult to drive away from the large, loving group of people I married into over two decades ago. But it will be a joy to spend more time with my side of the family too. It’s the ultimate definition of bittersweet for me.

Every big change in life has benefits and drawbacks. Every decision changes the road that memories will take. This is the hard part about being a grown up. Having to weigh the good and bad for a family with so many personalities and opinions can be daunting. The day we decided to move our family away from this great place called New York, we were very aware that it would change the course of six different lives.

But the train’s on the tracks. It’s hurling forward. It’s time to stop pondering the implications of what’s coming down the tracks and pick up a paintbrush. Those bathroom walls aren’t going to paint themselves.

Mother Love

As excited as we are about moving to Colorado, there are many precious things we’ll be leaving behind. One of the hardest will be a firecracker of a woman who has been a major influence in my life. I knew her by reputation long before I got my first hug from her.

When I met her son, back in the mid 1980s, I never dreamed I’d marry him some day. He quickly became one of my best friends and I loved trading family stories with him. He was a long way from his New Hampshire home as we got to know each other at our southern Missouri college. He had four brothers, I had four siblings also. He understood the concept of never getting a bowl of the good cereal unless you grabbed the box from the grocery bag the minute it came home from the supermarket.

He told me about this woman he called mom, and how she grew up thinking she’d never have kids, because she wasn’t really into babies, but then was blessed with a house full of boys. She was the perfect mom for boys - willing to coach any sports team and able to cook huge, filling meals. She took to the task so well that she began to take in exchange students from other countries. To this day she has ‘sons’ who live around the world.

It wasn’t long before her son and I saw our friendship grow into affection, then full blown adoration. My family knew him well but he was determined that his family should know me too, before any lifelong decisions were made. He and I made a flight back to New Hampshire the January of our senior year in college.

That’s when I first met her in person. Surrounded by sons who towered over her, she kept it all juggled perfectly. Hot, delicious meals showed up on the table three times a day. Family sports were organized during the day, board games around the table at nights. She always had a smile, and was always ready with a hug or a punch on the upper arm, whichever was appropriate (remember, she had all sons…).

After our wedding in November year she officially became a relative of mine. In the next year I watched her with great respect as she suffered through the loss of the love of her life, always carrying herself with class and grace. It was an accurate peek as to what this woman would be to me in the years to come.

She was the one who comforted me when we lost our first baby to a miscarriage, and the one I was most excited to tell when we found out we were pregnant again. I have always known that if anyone understood the joys and pains of life, and how to plow forward, it was this amazing woman I called a mother-in-law.

Then her fortitude was challenged again, as her son and I decided to move across the country, away from her, so he could attend graduate school. She could have been bitter, since her first grandbaby was growing in my belly and just four months away from being born. Instead of cradling a newborn in her arms, she would have to settle for a phone call, and the precious sound of her granddaughter’s first cries. But she never doubted our choices. Instead, she helped us load our Subaru station wagon and gave us warm hugs and bags of cookies as we hit the road.

She’s always been there for us, in a way I hope I can be there for my kids some day. She’s a great example of how a mother can lose her son but gain a daughter, letting go of what she needed to, to let him be the man she raised him to be.

When my own mother died, and I was so lost in grief, this is the woman who stepped in. I wasn’t ready, right away, to have a replacement mother, and she understood that. She stood in, as whatever I needed her to be, and never doubted my path of grief. She’s known grief, and she knew how important it was to just be present.

Two years later, when I thought I had already endured my dose of life tragedy, our third child became deathly ill from an undiagnosed metabolic disorder. We never told her what to do, or where to be. She just booked the flight and showed up. Always there exactly when we needed her.

And so it shouldn’t surprise me, that when we are once again breaking her heart by moving this house full of grandkids she loves so much far away from her, she has not responded with hostility or anger. Just support, love and encouragement. She’s loved having them in New England for five years and has treasured every new memory they’ve made together. But she knows us, and knows what’s best for our family. She accepts it, even if it’s not what’s best for her.

Last week, when I was quickly becoming overwhelmed with getting our house ready to sell, the phone call came. She and my step father-in-law were on their way. They showed up early on Saturday and for two long days they painted and patched and led the charge of house repairs. And, of course, as she always does so well, she fed us.

I’ll never be able to adequately thank this woman who has been such a great life role model for me. She’s set the bar pretty high. But my plan is a simple one. I’ll do my best to raise her grandkids in a loving, supportive home.

And some day, when they go off and have kids, I hope to be an amazing grandmother myself.

I’ll know I’ve succeeded the day one of my kids says, “You remind me of Grammy Berna”.

Serious Sorting

I hate to break it to you but my posts might start sounding like a broken record. Ever since my husband got the news of our impending move to Colorado, our life has been turned upside down. And much like my repeated themes of ‘letting go’ this time last year, as my oldest daughter was nearing her high school graduation, the new theme for the next few weeks might be ‘packing up and letting go’.

This week our lives centered around sorting through stuff. It’s a topic that many of my co-workers could relate to. You don’t have to be moving to be interested in the topic of cleaning out stuff you don’t need. In every stage of life there is a point you have to stop, regroup, sort out, and move on.

Every elementary school child knows the feeling. The last day of school is exciting and all, but in the end, that desk has to be free of personal stuff by the time the last bell rings. It usually means hauling home a big, brown grocery sack full of assorted papers and old pencils, that will be thrown under the bed until mom’s next cleaning frenzy.

Every freshly graduated kid, heading off to college, knows the drill. The entire contents of their bedroom is under the microscope, analyzed for its nostalgia factor. Every poster on the wall, every tattered stuffed animal, and every trophy sitting on a shelf gets its moment of decision. Is it important enough to be thrown into the box labeled ‘take to college’? Will it end up in the box headed for mom and dad’s attic? Or has it’s useful time been used up, its final destination to be a donation center?

Those of us who have lost parents have gone through it in a different way. It’s an odd feeling to be making those same kinds of decisions about someone else’s stuff. I will never forget the uneasiness I felt as my sisters and I sorted through my mom’s closet, as a favor to my dad, after she passed away. I turned to one of my sisters and said, “I just can’t get over the feeling that mom’s going to be really mad when she comes home and finds out we’ve given all of her stuff away…”

And then there are those of us who move a lot. Military families understand. They pack up and move at a moment’s notice and rarely complain about it. I have a friend who has six children and thinks nothing of moving every year or two, following her Marine husband’s career. She runs a streamlined ship and keeps me inspired.

We haven’t moved as much as she has but we’ve done our fair share. This will be our fourth move in ten years. It’s enough to make us feel like we halfway know what we’re doing this time around. Some aspects are similar with every move - the selling of the old house, the life in temporary housing, and the search for the new place we’ll call home. And of course, the sorting of the stuff.

We’ve been in New York for five years. That means you have to compute the following equation: Six people, times five years, adding in a dozen sports and a half a dozen hobbies…oh yeah, and thirty different birthday celebrations and five Christmas celebrations (that brought in countless assorted gifts) and you’re talking a lot of…um…“treasures’.

Which is why a very large dumpster was delivered to my driveway last weekend. We started with the garage and by mid morning we had finally found the floor. At lunchtime we all stepped back, admired our finally efficient space, and took a deep breath. It was now time to hit the basement, otherwise known as the place to throw things that we didn’t know what to do with.

Through one weekend we cleaned and purged. Everything was touched and analyzed. The giveaway pile filled the living room. The dumpster gradually became less empty. There is something about moving to a new house, in a new state, to make you feel like starting over.

For a few months I’ve known this move might be coming. I could have started the deep cleaning six months ago. But I didn’t. It’s easier to keep stuff if you think you might be staying. All the unused coloring books and fresh boxes of crayons I bought dirt cheap at back to school sales, but never used, were very comfortable in the cabinet upstairs. But once I knew I would have to pack them, move them, then unpack them, if I wanted to keep them, they easily went to the giveaway pile. All the stuff I tell myself I might use ‘some day’ is looked at with fresh eyes.

I look forward to setting up a more streamlined house in Colorado. It begins by clearing out all the extras before the moving truck even comes. But it continues by thinking, really thinking, about every item I bring into my house. Do we really need it? Is there justification for making room for it? Is there a way I could comfortably live without it?

I’ve been blessed with several cross country moves, in that they have forced me, time after time, to rethink what surrounds us in our home. It can be freeing to realize how little it takes to really be content. I’m hoping this is our last move for a decade or so. But maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible to pretend, every year or two, that a move is coming. It might help me keep our house more orderly and peaceful.

And maybe, just maybe, I can avoid having another dumpster in my driveway five years from now.

Mental Moving Math

The upheaval has begun. If you caught my column last week you know that our family is leaving New York. We’ve loved living on the East coast but the dry climate of the Rocky Mountains is pulling us back in that direction. The past week has been a roller coaster of activities and emotions.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been here five years. It’s been a unique time in our family’s life. In our first weeks in New York our oldest child started high school. When we leave in June, we’ll have two who have graduated from that same school. Each of our kids has lived a chunk of their childhood here, the years that you actually remember of childhood. To some it might seem hard, to move as often as we do, but as far as lifetime memories, sometimes it helps to keep the memories of life in order.

My kids will be great at current history questions when they are playing Trivial Pursuit in the future. They can tell you the year (and month) that the sniper attacked the Washington D.C. area because we lived there at the time.

My oldest son’s fourth grade teacher made her class dance in line as they walked from their classroom trailer to the main building every day, knowing a moving target is harder to hit. My daughter helped me pick out groceries online so we could have them delivered to the house, avoiding the vulnerability of walking across the grocery store parking lot. None of us will forget the day the sniper was taken into custody and we were allowed to go back to our normal lives.

My two oldest children have vivid memories of September 11th, not just on the day it happened, but the months after. We drove to New Hampshire to visit grandparents eight weeks after the tragedy, making a point to stop by every crash site. We saw the fence in the middle of a field in Pennsylvania, covered with tokens of grief for the plane that crashed over the ridge from that spot.

Then we drove through Manhattan, a block away from Ground Zero, and inched past the fence covered in posters of missing loved ones. On our way home we headed south and caught a glance of the gaping hole in the side of the Pentagon as we passed through D.C. History becomes so much more relevant when you have personal experiences with it.

I watched in horror as the news reports started coming out of Japan this week, and instantly I knew I would never forget the year of this tragedy. I’ll always recall that it was in the New York house, right before we moved. It’s how history is burned onto my brain - which house did we live in when that happened?

The huge waves that destroyed so many Japanese lives reminded me of a sunny day in Utah, and a conversation I had with my visiting stepmother. She was reading the daily newspaper as I cleaned up the breakfast dishes. I remember so clearly my stepmother saying, “It’s hard to believe…this paper says that hurricane that hit Louisiana flooded a big part of New Orleans….they say a large percentage of the city is underwater..” I was sure she was being an alarmist, being dramatic. “Oh, I don’t think that can be true,” I answered, “The reporter must have his figures wrong.”

Unfortunately, the report was correct and our country’s history took another major turn. But I remember that conversation taking place the year before we left Utah, so it had to be the summer of 2005.

Living in different places can also help in more personal family memories. My oldest learned to walk in a small duplex down the road from the college her daddy was attending. Her brother’s first steps were on that same hideous, multi colored shag rug. My middle son toddled for the first time in the house by the park and my baby boy became upright in our barn shaped house on the edge of town.

As we were cleaning out the basement this weekend we came across the old metal high chair we used for all of our babies. It’s the same one I sat in as a baby. I had repainted the tray for each of my children, decoupaging pictures of them to it, to entertain them during meals. My oldest son wondered why the pictures currently on the tray were not of our youngest child. With some mental moving math, I figured it out.

My baby boy was barely in a high chair when we began our cross country moves. The prime years he would have used it, it was traveling around in moving trucks and stored in temporary storage units. He missed out on having his face glued to the high chair tray.

As we move on to call a new state ‘home’ now, we carry with us a treasure chest full of memories that will always be associated with New York.

My oldest son finally got to run on a school track team, something he dreamed about since he was six. My daughter got her first car here. We were blessed to own a patch of woods, that became the kid’s personal playground, with air soft wars and tree forts. We’ve sledded down our own little sledding hill, that drops off right outside our mud room door, probably a million times. I found a writing group that inspired me to become the ‘real’ writer I’ve always wanted to be.

Life will go on.

Major national news events will continue to unfold. Our family’s history will change in big ways. And after this summer, those memories will be in Colorado. But each stage and each state has had its value and its beauty. Each major event will forever be framed in the context of where we lived when it happened.

It’s not such a terrible way to help this busy mom remember the important stuff.

Moving News

I will remember this day for a very long time. And the reason today was memorable has nothing to do with the fact that we woke up to freezing cold house because the heating oil ran out in the middle of the night. I didn’t panic. I knew George, my dependable oil guy, was already on his way this morning, to do his scheduled oil delivery.

I probably won’t remember that we were forecast to get a bunch of rain and a little snow, and instead woke up to a little rain and a whole lot of snow. Another snow day, which left me with a house full of kids.

But I’ll remember today because it was the good kind of ‘house full of kids’. The kids I’m surrounded by are in good moods, who have a special enthusiasm. They found out exciting news a few days ago. After nearly nine months of going through a difficult waiting process, their dad got a phone call on Friday that changes our lives. He got a job in Colorado.

We’ve loved living the past five years in New York. There are lots of great things about living here. We’ve explored the big City to our south and discovered fun places in Boston too. We know the roads to New Hampshire very well, having spent many weekends mixing and mingling with a whole bunch of fun family over there. Thanks to Grammy and Grandpa, the kids are familiar with the beaches of Maine and know the best place to get lobster there (Barnacle Billys!).

Albany has many treasures we’ll miss. The Plaza area under the Egg is a great place to take visiting friends and family. The State Museum is a treasure to explore, and their September 11th display will always make me cry. I’ve dragged my kids along the Indian Ladder Trail so many times they groan every time I say we’re having people come visit, knowing that’s my favorite place to take them.

We will leave behind many great friends too. Five years is a long time to build relationships. Sam almost set a record in our family, coming within a year of experiencing his whole elementary school career in one school. Each of our children has put down roots and built long term friendships. I’ve found a job that fits me perfectly and friends I will never lose touch with.

But we all knew we wouldn’t be in New York forever. Each of us missed the lifestyle we left back in the West. We loved the perfect snow, the dry climate, and the breath taking mountains. As the one who does the bookkeeping in our house, I desperately missed the lower cost of living and lower taxes.

So when our son was accepted into his first college of choice, a school in Utah, and we all realized that maybe it was time to think about another move, Colorado seemed like a really good fit.

We almost moved last fall. Then the job offer changed and it no longer worked for us. Out of the blue, another job opportunity came up and we began the waiting process again. So by the time the phone call came, saying it was real, we could hardly believe it. It was hard to comprehend. It’s still a bit difficult to wrap my brain around. But if I am to believe my usually trustworthy husband, it is true, and now comes the chaos.

I’ve been in this place before, knowing we are on our way out, but still very firmly grounded in a place I love. My most recent memory is of our transition from Utah to New York. Our very best friends lived across the street. Every day of packing ended with looking out my front window and seeing them, and their children, coming and going, and knowing I would forever miss that view. I knew there would be good friends in New York, but no one would specifically replace Jeff and Laura.

So today I am getting those familiar feelings. My children are all in good moods, which doesn’t happen a lot when you have four kids, three of them teens. They are all still in the excited phase, the one where we don’t have to think about the goodbyes yet, only about the fun parts of moving. They are dreaming of new bedrooms and new woods to explore. They are ready to have season passes to ski slopes that have perfect powder six months of the year.

I have them in cleaning out mode, as the house needs to go on the market soon. Suddenly, if it means packing it or not, they are seeing our belongings in a new way. More than half of our family board games didn’t make the cut, as one of my boys sorted through them, making a huge pile to donate. He was so enthusiastic about cleaning out that I had to save some of my favorites from the chopping block (I can’t live without all three versions of Apples to Apples).

I spent the morning photographing Lego creations that will now be dismantled and packed away. As we all worked together the radio blared in the background. My extra son, a neighbor who has become a part of our family and will always carry a part of my heart with him, hung out on the extra bed across the room, strumming the guitar and discussing chords with my boys. My little guy patiently and diligently filled ziplocs with the colorful pieces of each creation.

It was a magical snow day, that had very little to do with snow. It was our first day of living out our news and our first day of taking steps that will lead us down a new road. It was all good and exciting. No tears yet. Today held its own innocent brand of magic.

All of the excitement and none of the pain.