It's Been A Long Time...

It's been nearly seven months. I haven't had much to say. How do you sum up five years of your life succinctly? How can you even make sense of it all, let alone explain it to others? How do you convey the sense of unreality, the feeling that nothing is quite real, that it is all hazy and just a touch out of reach?

For anyone still wondering, we came back to Michigan on Memorial Day. We hit O'Hare Airport at about 8:30 in the morning, and began to sort out the mountain of stuff that we had managed to bring directly with us. My wife's aunt had brought our new Chevy Traverse up to one of the discount lots at the airport, and finding it was very easy. Big Red Chevy with Alaska plates.

Loading it was a little trickier, though. We put two dogs into the same kennel, and broke the other one down. Despite the cavernous space in the Traverse, we could not fit all of the totes that we had brought with us and the kennels. I ended up disgorging the contents of the totes into the back of the car, and leaving three out of four totes sitting next to the garbage can in the parking garage.

The days leading up to our departure were crazed and emotional. We sold everything that we did not take and just left the rest for the next residents of the building. We never did get postage on all 28 totes that we were shipping before we left. Our postmaster was kind enough to permit us to leave 21 of them in a very small building until we could get postage in the Lower 48 and ship it back to him. Our house was filled with people coming back and forth shopping our going out of business sale. Our friend Charlotte Larson was kind enough to come over and take Alice back to her house to play with her little girl, so that we could concentrate on packing and selling, packing and selling. Alice's babysitter, Valerie, and her cousin, Miranda, helped us every day, even though they knew that a painful parting was coming in a few days.

On Saturday night, we were invited to the house of some friends under a pretext. Because my wife was accosted by someone else wanting to do some shopping, I went over myself, with the idea that she would follow. I walked in to the house, and it seemed as if half the village was there. A beautiful going-away dinner, with words of thanks from all. A beautiful quilt that different hands joined to make. Many tears. Nice.

Sunday came, and we wrapped up what we could. Val and Miranda hauled our stuff in a trailer that they hitched to Val's dad's 4-wheeler. Off to the airport with Chelsea and Alice, and three dogs they went. Fortunately, Chelsea went back up to our apartment before she left and found the $800 in cash that I had forgotten there. Damn...I clearly wasn't thinking. I walked to the strip myself, and tipped my hat to one of my now former students who stopped on her 4-wheeler to say goodbye. Hugging Val and Miranda goodbye was as heartbreaking as you could imagine, and nothing that I try to describe will suffice. The plane was waiting as I walked up, so the parting was at least relatively brief. (Good news flash: they came to stay with us less than a month later, and ended up staying for 3 1/2 weeks.)

We had a last supper with our friends the Jungs in Bethel, and then boarded the Alaska Airlines jet in Bethel for the last time in our Alaska sojourn. We were leaving the life that we had known, and heading back to Michigan to see what kind of life we were going to find...