Settling in with the Wildlife

Our first month wasn't much different from Missouri: living with company, among unpacked boxes, but a wonderful time with loved ones. Now we start living here.

There is a wildness on the peninsula that has caught me by surprise. Animals don't seem threatened by the presence of humans; we're just a curiosity to them. The humans here are a curiosity to me, too...

The first day we were here we saw mule deer, a mother with spotted twin fawns. They looked at us with mild surprise, and then danced off into the clearing across the highway, floating through the air as I had never seen except in Disney cartoons. Since we have been here, the twins have lost their spots. One is getting bigger than the other; it must be a male.

Brazen little red squirrels found my bird feeder. When I went out on the kitchen porch this morning, the birds scattered, but the squirrels continued to eat. I don't mind, as long as they stay on the ground and don't tear up my feeder.

The first bird to find the feeder, the same day I put it up, was a goldfinch. He was eating thistle seeds on the hill just beyond it. By the end of the day, a whole flock of them had come. Goldfinches are abundant here in the summer, an online guide says, but they migrate south in the winter. We'll see if an abundant source of sunflower seeds will entice them to stay.

My bird book has yet to appear in any of the unpacked book boxes, so I'm winging it on the western birds new to me. I know the finches, sparrows and nuthatches; Steller's jay and tanagers were easy to identify. No cardinals! I miss them.

Moving

From the ridiculous to the sublime.

We’ve lived in this house since 1985. Moving that much living, from Missouri to Washington State, would be daunting, even if my husband and I weren’t certifiable hoarders.

Husband: “I found more of your books. Why do you have so many books?”

Wife:  “After I sold a few books in our first garage sale, you told me it was a bad idea to sell books. So I have every remaining book I’ve ever owned, including that set of encyclopedias I bought at the library sale, that they gave me for five dollars if I would also take the children’s set and the yearbooks. Besides, what are my few hundred books compared to your thousands?”

But in the middle of the ridiculous, I found a bit of the sublime: an article written about my son in the school newspaper when he was a sophomore in high school. He talked about our family’s experience of living in England for a semester which whetted his appetite for travel. My geographer husband loves to travel, too, and for a while he and Chris had a running competition about who had been in more countries. But Mike gave up years ago, because he can never catch up to Chris. After our European family trip, there were Canada and Mexico, then he joined engineering ministries international, and started traveling the globe:  two years in India, and trips to Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia.

“Roark strives for the limits,” says the headline. “I don’t like being normal,” he told the interviewer. He’s now living in Laos, teaching English to Buddhist monks. What could be further from “normal”? Living as a Christian in a Communist country where most people practice Buddhism—he’s still pushing the limits.

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Bed without the Breakfast

We're staying the night in Sioux Falls, in a Victorian house that was once pretty elegant but now could use a little TLC. The owner is very busy getting ready for her wedding, and offered, at a reduced rate, the bed without the breakfast.

We got here late because of detours. The Missouri is flooded.

Packing Day--grace in the corners

The most important purpose of our trip--after being present for the birth of our grandson, of course--is to deliver a carload of building materials Mike accumulated from online sites over the past six months. I was already worried about how full the car would be, and then he started pulling out of the closet a lot more things that he had bought for an earlier move that never happened. Packing enough clothes and household items to live out there for a month or two is a low priority that got lower all the time as space shrunk. We literally packed our clothes in the small spaces left between the antique shutters, Victorian light fixtures, and an antique washstand that will be turned into a bathroom sink cabinet.

I confess I wasn't very happy when I saw ceiling vents and light fixtures take the place that I thought would be reserved for luggage. But Mike and I tried earnestly to make this work while maintaining a Christian attitude. We each have a modest-sized carry-on type bag. I packed with clothes I didn't want rumpled, so I'll be wearing better and less summery clothes than I would have normally wanted to travel in. Not quite as bad as The Poisonwood Bible, where the main characters wore multiple layers of clothes on the airplane, to avoid paying extra weight...

But with a few sacrifices, we have made it! One of the sacrifices was leg room for me. Not such a great sacrifice. Sometimes there is an advantage to having short legs.

We leave behind three cats:

Jubilee, the Siamese, went to German professor Gabriele: When we took her to Gabriele's house, she was angry. She had seen our other two cats leave the house in carriers, and I think she knew she was being abandoned (from her perspective). But she's starting to adjust. She and her Siamese buddy Piccolo are racing through the house at midnight. Gabriele has trained Piccolo to sleep at night and then get up with her at 5 a.m. Gabriele will try to train her to do the same. Let's see if German fortitude can win over Siamese willfulness.

Abby, the overweight tabby: A man in Jackson took our other two cats. It wasn't love at first sight. But Abby warmed to him slowly, and I think he's warming to her too. He says she sleeps beside him on the couch, and plays with the kitten he adopted a few days later. Abby must be happy. All she wants out of life is to have a buddy and to be a couch potato.

Clea went with Abby, and seemed to make a quicker adjustment. She slept on the guy's bed the first night. Then, at the first opportunity, she ran out the door and disappeared. I was pretty upset. I had trusted God to safe homes for the cats, and then Clea took it on herself to run off.

Cats do find their way home. Clea was only a couple of miles from her old home. She's a good hunter, and savvy about coyotes. I looked at a city map, and the most direct route between her new home and her old home is through city parks and quiet streets. She could actually make it. It might take her weeks or even months, but there's no real hurry because we'll be gone for a month or two.

Wouldn't it make a great novel ending for her to come home? But this is real life.

Leaving day approaches.

We're leaving for Seattle a week from tomorrow. I say "leaving," not "moving," because the house in Jackson remains as full as ever of 33 years of living, and it is not yet on the market for sale. We should be returning in a month or two. We have an apartment to rent for September, and maybe longer. Caitlin's baby is due on the 17th, and after September we will play it by ear.

The cats are gone. We are attending many "last suppers," as Mike calls them, with friends we won't see for a while.

Now to the packing. It's going to be a mega-episode of "Clean House"!

the storage unit

I feel a little like Abraham--we own a home we don't live in. Nothing is there, but we're renting a storage unit with things in it that we hope to put in the house. Things like a vessel sink and a fat cat door.

On top of the mountain

When I turned 40, I started a section in my journal I called "On top of the mountain, not over the hill." God's joke on me: Here I am, over the hill and going to live on a mountain. Here's another joke: We have never set foot on the land we now own. When we visited our daughter and her family in Mountlake Terrace, Washington, we toured the Olympic Peninsula and fell in love with the area. We have only seen the lot online. We looked at lots on line and then our son-in-law Layne checked them out for us. Layne will also be building the house. My husband Mike, who is a geographer, got a satellite picture of the lot, and meticulously studies the videos has taken. He argues with Layne about the surveyor stakes he can see in the video. Laugh if you will, but as Mike has so often told me, "Don't argue with a geographer." Ninety-nine percent of the time, he's right. That other one percent, that is another blog and it's not pretty.