Moving Saga, Day 2

I missed a day in India but I’m writing just in time in America, before the end of the 4^th day! Ha! This blogging-every-day during a move is a wonderful and terrible idea. It’s like taking 30 minutes out to write every day the month of your wedding… or graduation… but with two kids and spanning time zones!  So… a little worse!

BUT it also causes me to draw up all of the days memories that I normally would end up forgotting and put them down in one place.   This time, I’ll reflect later on both the insanity and God’s faithfulness in all the details.

This town has had foreigners living here for a century, because of the hospital, the century-old language school, because of its pleasant climate in the Indian summer. One Auntie Huldah told me that she and her family would come up here in the hot summers and would ride on those buggies that sit up on stilts that were carried on mens’ shoulders!

So let’s just say that locals are accustomed to people coming and  going. The average hill people who have worked with and for foreigners are so accustomed to it that they hear that you’re moving away (practically before you know that you’re moving) and they start knocking, asking if you’re “selling” (i.e. giving) a baby bed, a washing machine, a scooter. All of our major things have been committed to friends and colleagues for months, but for all the extra little things that would cost more to ship than to purchase in our future neighborhood market, for those we’re having a give-away today. Every random localite is going to show up at my door this morning in one hour and forty-three minutes to frantically dig through pots, pans, baskets and baby clothes to see what they can use.

For me, it’s an extremely stressful process. My pulse picks up just thinking about it. So I’ve asked FOUR friends to come over and manage the three baskets of things to give away. And I’m thinking I might sneak out while it happens.

The second the movers had packed the last of our stuff onto the garbage truck and drove off, I went limp and felt such relief that I had a hard time keeping my eyes open for twenty-four hours. My adrenaline was all drained out.

But this morning I woke up after one of the longest sleepless nights we have EVER HAD, and my adrenaline started pumping again.

Got to get the house cleaned up, the stuff thrown in the suitcase, and get ourselves and the kids up to the local B&B for two nights. Rokeby Manor. It’s the same B&B we had dinner at the first night we arrived on this mountain. We only planned it this way because our friend is the GM and helped us book it, but now I see this strangely coincidental significance of it.

God is good. He knows how to bring meaning in the little things if we take time to see them.

At noon today the landlord will come check out the house, and we’ll move the kids and our six suitcases up to a local B&B for two nights before we move. At least once we’re there we won’t have to sort or cook or think. We’ll just have two days of goodbye meals, hikes, parties, and more goodbyes. I can’t think about it yet. I might throw up.

Little Miss has had a fever of up to 103 off and on for 3 days, and it finally broke last night. But she cried on and off all night because of her cough and kept calling us in and saying she wanted to go “ghoomy- ghoomy” (exploring outside). And we were standing in the dark arguing about whether to let her cry it out in her bed (because these days she’s so articulate she’s yelling at us in English and that feels different from random cries), or whether to hold her squirming and wrestling indefinitely in the dark… In the end I don’t even remember what happened. I know at some point was given Tylenol. At another point Judah got a diaper change cuz he was in our bed, stinking it up. And at another point both kids were hungry enough that they were fed yoghurt in the dark and laid back down (at two different times). Ugh… what a way to sleep (or not sleep) our last night in this beloved cottage.

SO the time has run down to an hour and twenty minutes till we need to be packed up and I could ramble on forever. But we keep plugging on, and I know that in several days we’ll be sitting on a plane to America talking about how the time flew by.

So here’s to being present (and pleasant sans sleep) until that very last moment.