Taking off

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

7:50 pm DC time

Hello friends and family (from Jennifer),

This is my first blog entry, and a blog is a strange thing for an introvert to attempt, but as long as I figure it’s just you folks I know, I’ll be ok.

We’ve done it now. We’re on an airplane heading from DC to San Francisco. All of our worldly belongings are sitting in the shipyard in Baltimore. It turns out there’s a reason that more people don’t do this—it’s really really hard. It’s a lovely day in DC today—cold and crisp. We took the kids to school and they were amazingly cheerful and upbeat. I have waited and waited for them to get overwrought and out of control, and somehow it just hasn’t ever happened. And I know that it could easily still be coming, but I’m just so grateful that we could get through the really difficult packing days without children who were losing it. Today was exceptionally hard. We said goodbye to our fantastic neighborhood, school, and house. Over the last week, we’ve said goodbye to all kinds of important people—well-loved friends, colleagues, and family. I have a good sense that we’ll see nearly all of those folks again, and so what we’re really mourning is the lack of daily (and relatively effortless) contact. Today we said goodbye to the casual school acquaintances whom we’ll never see again. The pain of losing those relationships surprises me each time I move (I’m a slow learner). There’s something about having people you see each day on the street, watching women get more and more pregnant and then have babies and then watching the babies learn to walk—even if I never even know their names, there’s something precious and connecting about that. There are parents at Oyster I’ve seen nearly every day for four years. I love the parade across the Ellington bridge and down Calvert Street every day. Today the parade was filled with, “So today is the big day?” and “Good luck” and “We’ll miss you.” And even though most of those people don’t even know our first names (we’re still mostly “Naomi and Aidan’s parents”), I believe there really is a way that they’ll miss us and that we’ll miss them—and that they send us off with their hopes for our successful journey. Ok, now to read to Naomi…