Say you are well, or all is well with you, And God shall hear your words and make them true. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Maybe one day my grandsons will look at my blog as it is right now and wonder, "Where'd you disappear to, Grandma?"

I have to admit it's been pretty quiet around here.  Not because I have nothing to write about.  No, that's not the problem at all.  Maybe the problem is I have too much to write about.  I don't know where to begin.  So I come here in the evening with good intentions.  I sit down here at my lovely desk.  And I draw a blank.

Where...how...do I begin to tell you what my life is like now that I'm finally settled into my new home here in Michigan?  How do I tell you how different it is from living in Oregon?  How do I tell you how even the quality of the air is different, fresh and clean and almost like living near the sea, even tho I'm at least 800 miles from the nearest ocean?  The soil is dark and loamy.  The grass is thicker and denser.  I don't know the species of most of the trees that line the street I live on.  The accent I hear is different.  The sky is incredibly huge.  Houses are almost all made out of brick.  I feel safe here.  I've been told we don't even need to lock our cars if we go into the store.  I hear church bells pealing all over the town not only on Sundays but even during weekdays.  Our neighborhood is full of people walking by, kids riding on  bikes, little girls playing hopscotch.  People smile at you as they pass you by in the parking lot at the store and say, "Hi, how are you?  Isn't it a beautiful day?"  It's like I've stepped back into a simpler, kinder world.  Where Easter is celebrated as a Christian holiday and you can say "Happy Easter!" and not worry about whether you're being politically correct or not.

Boy, is it nice!

I like it when Dear Hubby and I sit out on the porch in the evening and people wave at us as they drive by.  I like going into a store and have clerks come up to me and ask me if they can help me.  And, if they can, they actually walk with me and show me where something is located.  People are polite.  When you go grocery shopping people don't use their shopping carts as missiles to bully their way down the aisles.  Maybe it's different in Detroit, but here there is no graffiti.  There is civic pride.  Neighborhood pride.  The houses on our street are beautifully maintained and people take care of them. 

I have traveled all the way across southern Michigan to the western border now.  I have driven many back roads on Saturday with Dear Hubby as we sightsee and learn more about this beautiful state we live in.  We've seen deer and woodchucks.  Snow geese.  Greater Canada Geese were all over the place when we first arrived here.  There are even signs asking you not to feed the geese.  They're migrating.  And I have seen cardinals' scarlet bodies flicker thru the treetops.  I have seen my first Great Lake...Lake Huron...and it was breathtaking.  It was immense.  I have never seen anything like it.

And even tho I'm 2400 miles from everything that has been familiar and dear to me for  57 years of my life I am not the least bit homesick.  Sure, I miss friends and family but I honestly don't ever want to go back.  Not to live.  Because Michigan is part of who I am now.  I am a Michigander.  And I like it.

Weather forecast for tonight: dark. ~ George Carlin

I awoke to rolling claps of thunder this morning that seemed to resound thru the heavens forever. The rain was drumming down on the roof and lightning flashed and lit up the bedroom. I can not remember ever waking up to a thunder storm when I lived in Oregon.

Yesterday Dear Hubby and I took a drive to West Bloomfield early in the morning. He has been a bow hunter for many years and had heard about the Detroit Archers club, one that Fred Bear, a legend in the archery world, had been a member of. There was a pea-soup fog and it was 44 degrees as we left Livonia. We didn't see much of the surrounding countryside during our drive. We could barely see 10 feet in front of us. But once we got home the fog lifted so quickly it was hard to believe it had ever been here. And within a short span of time it was 82 degrees.

Since arriving here in Michigan, natives have been telling me if you don't like the weather, wait. It'll change in 5 minutes.

You know what? They're telling the truth

Every man's memory is his private literature. ~ Aldous Huxley

There will be stars over the place forever;
Though the house we loved and the street we loved are lost,
Every time the earth circles her orbit
On the night the autumn equinox is crossed,
Two stars we knew, poised on the peak of midnight
Will reach their zenith; stillness will be deep;
There will be stars over the place forever,
There will be stars forever, while we sleep.

-- Sara Teasdale

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

I never have been one to hold on to material things with a very tight hand. I have never put much value...well, very little value...on jewels or fancy possessions. I am the daughter of parents who grew up in New England in the heart of the Great Depression and from my earliest days I was taught the value of a dollar. I was also taught "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." I'm not miserly but I am very careful with money. And I was raised with hard-work ethics. So was Dear Hubby. Everything we have, we've worked for.

But I can not find my jewelry box.

It's old and careworn. It belonged to my paternal grandmother and was one of the few items I took when my Dad and I emptied out his parents' house after his father had died. She had died many years previously. I took her Bible, her desk, her chair, a sewing basket...and this old jewelry box. I remember showing the box to my daughter as we were packing up for our move to Michigan. There wasn't anything in there worth much, outside of mine and Dear Hubby's wedding rings. And honestly, outside of sentimental value, they aren't worth anything that I know of either. We paid $125 for mine and around $100 for his back in 1974. But there was also a beautiful old diamond ring that belonged to my great-grandmother and I inherited it. And that is the one item I'm concerned about. Because that is something that means a lot to me.

I'm sure as I start going thru several boxes I have stored in cupboards that still need to be unpacked I'll come across it. I remember putting it in a box, and my daughter remembers me putting it in one, too. I just can't remember which one. Towards the end of the flurry of packing and the insane pace we were functioning at, closing up our home of 28 years in Portland and setting off for Michigan, I got to the point where I was letting go of more and more. Every item I came across seemed a little less valuable to me, a little less-needed. I just wanted the packing over. I think we ended up donating around 40 bags worth of stuff to the Goodwill, not counting truckloads of things that wouldn't fit in bags, and we gave lots of stuff away. We pared down and purged, and then purged and pared down some more.

I learned something valuable while we lived in hotel suites for 3 weeks before finally getting our house. I learned it's not things that mean so much in the scheme of things. You can survive without much. We'd thought we'd be moving in as soon as we arrived here so all I had packed were clothes for the week we'd spent at a hotel suite in Portland. I managed to clothe myself decently for two more weeks, thanks to laundry facilities in the hotel here in Livonia once we'd gotten here. What we had of value was our family...our children, our grandchildren. We had each other for support and solace and encouragement. We had our rough moments of just being so tired of the situation we were in, but it just made finally getting into our homes all that much sweeter. And it's funny. Even as I've UN-packed, I'm still taking more stuff to the Salvation Army here. I'm tired of stuff.

But I will be happy when I find that jewelry box.

A Life of pages waiting to be filled... -- Michael W. Smith

It's a funny thing, moving away from all that's familiar to a place where things are seemingly the same and yet...aren't.. I mean, Michigan is part of the United States of America, as is Oregon. And yet Michigan is so different. The air is different. The terrain is different. The architecture is different. The roads are different. There aren't potholes back here...there are teeth-jarring craters in the road at the end of winter you quickly learn to dodge if you don't want your front end knocked out of alignment every time you drive to the grocery store. Life doesn't stop back here when it's 5 degrees outside. Babies and toddlers are swaddled up to their eyeballs in parkas and caps and mittens and boots. I have not seen one feral cat. In fact, outside of a neighbor's cat I spy every now and then sitting on a table looking out the window, the only other cat I've seen was one dead by the side of the road a few weeks back. Today is April 5th...the sun is shining...and yet flurries of snowflakes were falling in the sunlight. I thought they were cherry blossoms until I realized there aren't any trees in blossom here yet.

I have visual memories that will come to me every now and then during the day. Like on Sunday when Dear Hubby and I walked all the way over to Farmington Road and I said to him I was almost more tired walking 4-5 miles of flat streets than I was when we walked to the top of Mt. Tabor. And then I pictured the beauty of Mt. Tabor -- pictured above -- and the vista of downtown Portland from the western side, and the majestic beauty of Mount Hood from the eastern side. And I could see it crystal clear in my mind's eye, the many mornings we'd trudge up there around daylight or on a warm summer evening. It's a moment's memory like that that will jar my heart. And I'm not sure if I miss it. I haven't had a moment of homesickness yet. And yet a moment's memory will make me feel...unsettled. I guess where I'm at right now is somewhere between finishing pulling all the roots up before planting them down deep in new soil. The work is being done but I've yet to experience the harvest.

I love my new home. I love my new town. I love my new state. I feel welcome here. I am not lonely here. I am at peace here.

It is amazing how quickly we humans adjust, how quickly the unfamiliar becomes familiar. How I wake up in the middle of the nite and know that I'm home already. I am not lost.

Home. At Last.

Can it possibly be?! Are we finally moved in? Do I have a house to call home now? The answer is yes, yes, yes!

What a journey.

We arrived in Livonia on March 5th. We spent two weeks 'living' in the Comfort Inn on Middlebelt Road a tantalizing 5 blocks away from 'our' house. But thanks to the very incompetent ministrations of Chase Bank's home loan department in Portland, we arrived thinking we were ready to move right in, only to find the loan couldn't be processed in Michigan if it originated in Oregon. They hadn't even bothered to open up the FHA Appraisal that stated a few repairs were needed before the loan could close. They hadn't even bothered to inform us of all this. Every phone call, every email I sent, I was given the same answer: "Everything's moving right along. It's with the underwriters and should be closing at the end of February". So Dear Hubby and our d-i-l set out to drive across country at the end of February. And when they were in Iowa Dear Hubby received a phone call from our realtor: "We've got problems!" He hadn't heard anything from Chase in a long time and took it upon himself to call our loan officer, only then to find out we didn't have a loan, let alone being even close to closing. We were nowhere! So Dear Hubby called me with this news, totally freaked out. Not only ours wasn't any good...neither was the kids' loan for their house. Now what to do?! Here Dear Hubby and our stressed-out d-i-l are in Livonia by this time and the rest of us are living...surviving...in a Days Inn in Portland waiting to fly out to Detroit that Saturday while our belongings and vehicles were on their way across the country. Arggghhhh.

To make a long, stressful-beyond-belief, and wild story short, our wonderful guardian angel of a Real Estate Guy named Bill and a mortgage broker friend of his named Sam went above and beyond the call of duty to secure home loans for both of us from square one, doing everything they could to push the closing dates up as quickly as possible. And two weeks later we finally took possession of our homes. But our possessions themselves were still in storage, somewhere in Indiana, so we had to wait a couple of extra days to have them delivered. But they arrived and some great moving guys got us all settled. The kids didn't even have to stay with us for a couple of weeks, like we'd originally thought. Sam the Miracle Worker got everything closed on the same day. I could've kissed the guy.

And now I'm all hooked up to the fastest internet I've ever had. I am back typing on a keyboard at 70-75 wpm instead of plunk-plunk-back space-back space-plunk-plunking on my new Droid phone. I am more than happy to put that thing back to just being a phone, tho I must admit it was nice to have something give me limited internet access. I was just abominably slow typing with my left thumb. And 9 times out of 10 whatever I wrote wouldn't post or send anyway. Sigh. I wish I knew how many emails are lost somewhere in the outer darkness of cyberspace.

I feel like I'm starting from the very beginning again. Like it's going to take time to find my 'blog' voice once more. It feels like forever since I've written anything of any substance. I feel rusty and very out of practice. Like my voice is creaky from lack of use. But it feels so good to be here once more, chronicling our lives for the grandboys. I wish I'd been able to keep it up-to-date while we made our way 2/3 of the way across the country. But so much of it was so hard. So much of it was scrabbling around to find the needed paperwork when everything was stashed away somewhere in the back of a semi truck trailer somewhere in Indiana. It was days of trying to keep two little boys who were beyond sick of being stuck in hotel suites for three weeks entertained and quiet. It was more dinners out in restaurants than I care to eat ever again.

Ah, but we survived. We did. And in looking back at it now a couple of weeks later it doesn't seem so bad after all. I'm sure a year from now we'll laugh about it, rolling our eyes and calling it our Grand Adventure of a Lifetime.

But do I want to move again any time soon?

No, thank you.