The Long Haul

My husband is officially retired. After 30 years in public education, both as a teacher and a school counselor, he has finished his career. I can't even begin to imagine the number of children, whose lives he touched. And now, at the relatively young age of 56 he gets to begin his life again.

Last year around this time we bought a house on the Oregon Coast. It's such a beautiful pieces of property. Twelve acres of forest and grass and you can hear the ocean from the deck, even if we can't actually see it from there. It's so quiet, magnificent and peaceful. It's cool in the summer and not too cold in the winter. We bought this house so that my husband could move there when he retired. We made this plan years ago. Knowing he would retire before my daughter would graduate from high school, we knew that he would go alone, until Nicole was ready to go to college.

So, here we are....My husband is moving to Oregon soon. He was planning to leave on Monday, but he has never been on time in his life. When he said the 7th of June my daughter and I started making bets....I said the 10th, Nicole said the 14th. Suffice it to say that he hasn't even started packing yet, so the 7th is clearly not the day. Nicole may have even been giving the benefit of the doubt when she gave him an entire week more than he had planned.

I wonder what the house will look like with of all his things gone. We have lived in our house for 8 years and a family can accumulate a lot of stuff in 8 years that really isn't necessary. Since Nicole and I will be moving to a smaller house soon, we really will have to downsize. I'm actually looking forward to the major purge of stuff. It's times like this that I find myself wishing I were Bewitched, and I could just wiggle my nose and it would all be done. Packing and moving is so stressful and having to do it alone is probably going to be even worse.

So we start the long haul....