The Next Chapter

Sorry I haven't posted in a few days, I've been busy with all of the moving preparations. Even though the Army pays for a moving company to come in and do all of the packing and heavy lifting, there is still a lot to do! Monday was packing day, and today was loading day. All of my worldly possessions (or...most of them) are now on a truck heading West, due to arrive at a storage facility in Fort Irwin Friday or Saturday. I took some pictures today, I'll try to upload them later - I'm just really tired right now!

As happy as I am to be getting out of here, I'm also a little bit sad. As I walked around my empty house this evening, a little bit of the melancholy came over me. While I will NOT miss the puppy-sized roaches, the 200% humidity or the fact that every road in Lee County is named "Lee Road", I will miss our home, our friends and having my parents nearby. As I was peeling off the Winnie the Pooh wall stickers from Aiden's walls I flashed back to when I put them up. The empty rooms reminded me of the day after Closing, when we walked through the house thinking, "this is OURS".

But I also sensed something else. The house had changed, now that it was empty again. A house is just a collection of rooms; it's the people and the life that is lived there that make it a home. Our life is no longer in that house, it's in a bunch of boxes in the back of a truck, and it's in the two carseats in the back of my car - two items we didn't have when we moved here to the South. So tomorrow I will close the door for the last time to this chapter in our lives, and Thursday we will set off for the next. Sweet home southern California - here we come.