Tomorrow is moving day for us. We have a truck reserved and a crew to help with loading and unloading. Our goal is to move all of the furniture and heavy items. Some household goods and clothing we’ll move ourselves after we have returned the truck. That means that today is a day of preparation. Fortunately, we aren’t moving many appliances: just a washing machine, clothes dryer and a small chest freezer. But there are beds which need to be broken down and have the mattresses and box springs placed in protective bags. The dining room table needs to have the pedestal removed and the leaves carefully packed. The sideboard needs to be emptied of fragile items. We’ve already emptied the bookcases and packed up the books. Still there is a lot of work to accomplish in the next three days.

For regular readers of my journal the move may mean a slight disruption in publication. The company that provides our Internet service says that we’ll have service in the new place tomorrow, so the move may not involve an interruption of service, but it is based on my moving the equipment and getting everything hooked up correctly, which shouldn’t be a big deal.

Back when we were students, we packed up everything we had and moved a couple of times each year. We’d live in a student apartment for 9 months and work at summer jobs in other locations, with much of our household in storage. Of course back in those days we didn’t own any furniture and we were used to setting up an efficiency apartment in a couple of hours. When friends asked for help moving we’d ask, “Are you moving in the morning or afternoon?” That was a long time ago. For 25 years, from 1995 to 2020, we lived in the same house and filled it with all kinds of things we thought we wanted to have. Some of those things, like an antique bedroom set that has been in the family for many generations, have deep sentimental value to us. Some items, like our living room couch, are the product of years of planning and saving.

We know that we need to downsize, and we have tried hard to do so. We didn’t quite meet the goal of reducing our possessions to a home half of the size of the one we had in Rapid City, but our new home is smaller than the rental where we have lived for the last year and the rental is smaller than the house we had in Rapid City. We seem to be moving in the right direction.

In another sense, however, our move has some elements that surprise us. When we first moved to Rapid City, our home was outside of the city limits. During the time we lived there, our subdivision was annexed and we became residents of the city. We moved from Rapid City to an urban area slightly more populated than our South Dakota home. Now we are moving back out of city limits to what is called a “census-designated place.” The official census counts the number of people in our general area distinctly from other communities, but it doesn’t have an incorporated city. Our mailing address is Blaine, a city just north of where we will live. Blaine’s northern boundary is the US-Canada border. The peace arch international monument has one side in Blaine and the other in Canada. When we left South Dakota, we joked about moving to a place where we could walk to Canada. It turns out that we are moving to a place where we can.

Birch Bay is a protected bay on the east shore of the Salish Sea. The shallow bay experiences the warmest water temperatures of the Washington coast. Our new home is approximately 100 miles north of Seattle and about 35 miles south of Vancouver, BC. It takes less than 15 minutes to walk from our house to the beach. That is a remarkable address for people who have lived most of our lives more than a thousand miles from an ocean. On Monday, we walked down to the beach and continued to marvel at how our life’s journey has brought us to this place.

The biggest attraction of the new home for us is that it is 2 1/2 miles from our son’s farm and th home of three of our grandchildren. To be close enough to their place to pick up the kids from school and have them come over to our house is a real treat and a luxury that many of our friends cannot have. The kids have already been over to our new home and explored it from top to bottom. Our son has already been a huge help in preparing for our move. He will take time off from work tomorrow to be a part of our moving crew.

The truth is that we haven’t downsized as much as we need to. My tools have found their home in our son’s barn where we have a shared shop. We have items stored in another of their outbuildings. We still have a big challenge to sort and get rid of items.

There is, however, a sense of accomplishment to be moving out of our rental home. We’re back in the housing market, which is a challenging and important place to invest. And we are looking at this move as one where we will stay put for a decade or more. We’ll be able to hang our pictures on the walls and settle in. We’ve already painted one room in the color that suits us. The journey from our Rapid City home to a new permanent home was simply too big of a venture to do in one step. Had we purchased a home a year ago, we might have bought one in the wrong location. Our son was moving to the farm at this time last year.

Our grandchildren are excited that we have a house on a street with other houses with lots of children. They found their farm to be a rather challenging neighborhood for trick or treat last Halloween. They’ve already planned to be at our house on Halloween and going up and down our street to check out the treats. We’ve checked with the neighbors, who have told us it isn’t unusual to host a couple of hundred children for trick or treat. That’s a big difference from our Rapid City home. We’ve got just a bit over a week to get ready.