Moving and saying goodbye

Over the past two months I have been saying goodbye to my congregation.  My husband had been making great efforts to land a job that he could explore his passions in an organization with staff who loved film and worked together as a team.

As he began to interview, I started therapy.  I wanted to prepare myself in case big changes were afoot. I had been overwhelmed by a string of deaths of beloved members of my congregation, as well as my grandmother and niece a year and a half ago.  So I got to feel my grief and listen to my emotions which were pretty much yelling at me to pay attention. 

So I said goodbye.  I am glad I took two months to do it.  There was so much to say and do.  I have a lot of love and memories with my parishioners.  Then the last two weeks the goodbyes intensified as we celebrated together with gifts and stories and then had our last annual meeting together.

We came up to the area the week between Christmas and New Years.  We looked at 6 places, 1 in Seattle and 5 in Tacoma.  Our eyes were opened to the housing market.  There were no houses in our price range that we could fit into anywhere north of Tacoma, that we could find.  Thankfully the house we all agreed on had no applications on it and after a lot of panic trying to get our rental history and paperwork together to apply, we were finally accepted.  One hope that I had was that we could spread out a little bit and have a larger space.  We got that and even have room for me to have a sewing area and for guests to stay with us.

Moving out was hectic.  We took one load up mid-January when we got the keys.  We brought all the heavy furniture and wore ourselves completely out getting them up the stairs and in.  During the following week I interviewed for a job up here, so I made the trip two more times.  Once, Nick and Sterling came, too, and we spent the night in our new house.  We were able to leave one of the cars in Tacoma.  The second time, I was up and back in one day.  But that was one day I wasn't packing or cleaning.  The job ended up not being for me.  It was frustrating because the board was split over whether to hire me and it seemed to come down to their lack of trust that I would be committed, because it would have been a long commute from Tacoma.  I felt like they were trying to parent me.  I also felt like they wanted too much from the person filling the position and didn't care very much about that person having much of a life.  They saw the job being 50 hours a week and there were no benefits.  So I am frustrated and relieved at the same time.

I finished work on the 27th, and packed up my office on the 28th.  We spent the next two days packing and cleaning the house.  Friends came and helped us, thankfully, or we'd have never got as much done as we did.

We packed the truck.  Loaded up boxes from the basement.  We ran out of time to do the deep cleaning.  We drove up here.  When we got to Tacoma, Sterling shouted excitedly, "They have Target, here!"  Through this all, he has been excited and ready for an adventure.  I'm trying to be more like him.