Patience is a Virtue

Ernesto, the Amazing Dining Room Tree 

We went to do our final walk through at Zang today.  Addie and Eric played in the little fort in the yard, and Nolie and I lay on the porch while she drank her bottle.  I felt so peaceful there, looking up at the sky from our porch, surrounded by huge, old-growth trees, at the house that will soon be ours.  I patted the tree in the dining room, dreamed about where my desk would go, about tucking Addie into her new bed in her new room at night.

There seems to be so much work between us and moving into that new place--the moving and the cleaning and the unpacking.  And I need to finish grading and prep for a meeting next week, too.  But I'm so looking forward to getting in there, and futzing with where everything is going to go, and with making plans for what we'll work on first.  I'm excited to be out of debt (other than this new, big mortgage, and student loans, of course, but I think of those as good debt.  Cheap debt.  Is that self-delusional?).  I'm excited for our vacation in June, for the new space this house gives all of us, for our neighborhood with its horses and sheep and fresh eggs for sale down the street. 

Today, I'm wandering around this old house, cleaning things up and packing things away, and silently saying goodbye to each crooked old wall, each splintered window casing, each notch in the hardwood floor.  I'm like a kid before a very big Christmas, impatient and flush, and so am busying myself with little tasks and the girls, and trying not to get too overwhelmed with the thrill of it all.

48 hours to go.  Not that I'm counting.