I needed a few minutes to dust off the cobwebs from this sad little neglected space before I sat down to write today. I didn't have any intentions of going this long without posting but I suppose I forgot just how crazy moving can be. The boxes, the travel, the odds and ends, the seemingly never ending list of projects. It's all I can do these days to keep my head above water. And with this little boy coming in two months I'm really a ball of nerves as we try to get this house/new life ready.
So here I am today, in a new room but at my old desk that has followed me from California to Virginia and now Georgia. My view is no longer of our beloved woods but of a row of homes. It's hard to believe sometimes that the cabin is now in the past. When I occasionally scroll through photos on my phone and come across a few from our life back in the Valley it strikes me just how unique life was there. Now this is by no means a way of saying that I'm just moping around missing the cabin because trust me we are LOVING it here. The cabin had it's charms and it will always hold a special place in our hearts but for someone who is about to become a mother of two and works from home the conveniences of life here are a welcome relief.
When we left the cabin over two weeks ago we were in such a rush. Papa bear and his brother wanted to get on the road as soon as possible as they were driving our belongings down and the rest of us were just dog tired. Moving while six months pregnant with a toddler is quite the adventure let me tell you. So that night instead of heading to Maryland where I would be staying for a few days before joining papa bear in Georgia Birdie and I stayed at a hotel. The next morning I felt a strong desire to pay the cabin one last visit before I leave. Our car grunted up the familiar dirt road and I turned into our driveway. Birdie fumbled up the stairs to the deck and I unlocked the door and walked in. And it hit me, the first pang. It wasn't home anymore. Our things were gone, our smells were gone, our life there was... gone. Poor Birdie ran around the house confused. She got especially frustrated when she got to her room. I sat down on the floor with her and tried to explain all these changes to her while flipping through photos of our new house on my phone. When there wasn't much else left to do I took one last look out of the kitchen window where I spent so many hours washing dishes, washing my baby or just daydreaming. To my surprise there was a gigantic luna moth sitting right on the window. In all our three years of living there we had never seen one. I couldn't help but shake the feeling that it was some sort of sign.
Finally, I strapped Birdie into her carseat and headed back down the mountain. She was asleep within minutes and that's when I let it go. I silently ugly cried for a solid hour as I made my way through the winding country roads past fields and farms and forests. I cried for everything the cabin meant to us. I cried for the beautiful life we built there. I cried for the good times and the bad times and I cried because of all the unknown. But mostly I cried because I was happy. Happy and grateful for this crazy life we live, for the experiences we've had and will continue to have and happy for our family.
Life is so unpredictable, absent of any guarantees. We wake up each day vowing to do our best and hoping for the best. Some days are hard, some days are bad and some days are just amazing. But when it's all said and done I think it all ends up in the good column sooner or later because even the hard or the bad was a lesson we would never regret. And so we adventure on, fearlessly, stronger today than we were yesterday.