Down they go!

First meal: artisan toast with
cranberry goat cheese and
pickled herring. (Yes, we're
eating our way through the pantry.)

How did you feel the last time you moved? Was it hard - or a relief - to go through the things that had to be left behind? Was moving away a mind trip? Did you love your arrival and the new place?

Our kids and 2-year-old granddaughter moved in with us a month and a half ago. When we negotiated living together, everyone promised not to push me into an unfinished space: I've done it twice before and it's unsettling (to say the least). So while Timo and W left for work each day, M and I have been doing cooking and doing chores around the boxes (theirs and ours) in the hallways and rooms.

The whole project started in April, after we felt called to move to Indonesia next year. We had an unfinished basement space, impossibly heaped with shelves, boxes, a commercial pool table, and years of unexamined storage. Our kids' lease was expiring in the fall; we'd need a place to stay on furloughs. After confirmation of our appointment, I sold our dining table, movers shifted the pool table into what used to be our dining room, and the project got underway.

A first look at our living room / bedroom

I planned the space while W cleared and sorted and removed. Placing the walls and plumbing on a sketch, I could almost imagine the future. There were a few bumps and re-negotiations along the way, shifts in thinking when building reality leaned against my drawings.

Slowly but surely, a home emerged. W and our son scrubbed 20 years of living off the concrete floors and painted them white. Friends helped plumb, drywall, and paint walls and ceilings the same white color. Our friend Terry wired the basement, asking, "Won't the living room be too bright with six sconces @ two bulbs each?"

I can safely say, "Nope. Just right." I'm not a friend of darkness by day.

Another side of the room

The guys dragged down our bigger furniture, while I made dozens of trips daily between the upper floor and the basement, boxes in hand. There's barely been time to wipe down the emptying spaces. Our daughter-in-law, highly pregnant, is nesting for the baby's arrival next month. She's on my heels with a washrag and vacuum. "I have a thing for deep-cleaning when I move in or out," she says. If we would have moved the normal way, I would have done that for her. Oh well, another casualty of good intentions.

Strangers have come and gone, hauling away our past life. Furniture, rugs, cookware, and decor found new homes through Craigslist and Freecycle, funding our build-out below. Reef tanks, dogs, and "future replacements" for the house ... gone. My brother purchased our friend's grand piano from the living room. Gradually we've emptied the kitchen, bathrooms, and my office.

And a comfy chair behind the
zebra hide footstool.

Monday, I packed the last of our daughter Kirsten's things into our SUV, meeting the mover who was dead-heading a run to Austin, where she lives. We'd loaned K's piano to a family in the next suburb: the mover  pushed the piano up the ramp, loaded her treasures and my Bernina sewing machine into his truck, and pulled away.

We spent our first night downstairs yesterday. The mattress is comfy and we woke when we were rested: there are no windows to tell us when the sun comes up. Before work, W sorts info on his computer, a few feet away from where I type.

Today, it seems farther up two flights of stairs to our bedroom to empty our bedroom closet than it was coming down from upstairs. But that baby and our relocation to Indonesia is waiting for no one. Off we go.

Read more:
*I have ventured to speak to the Lord, although I am but dust and ashes. Genesis 18:27 NASB

*Christ says, "Everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened." Luke 11:10 NEV

*Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. Galatians 6:2 NIV

*Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. James 1:2-6 NIV

Moravian Prayer: Loving Father, although we were born from dust and ashes, may we ask for blessings when we are in need. When we seek you Lord, let us find you there. Reassure us that you will answer. Amen.

*(CS Lewis, to Mary Willis Shelburne, June 5, 1961: On being overconcerned about the past of others and of our own.) We must beware of the Past, mustn’t we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past. Not so the saved. This is one of the dangers of being, like you and me, old. There’s so much past, now, isn’t there? And so little else. But we must try very hard not to keep on endlessly chewing the cud. We must look forward more eagerly to sloughing that old skin off forever—metaphors getting a bit mixed here, but you know what I mean.