It is a perfect autumnal Sunday morning in Ohio, quite beyond improvement. Sitting in the quiet sunshine, I am acutely aware that it is the last such morning we’ll spend with the New York Times on the stone patio of our home in Columbus. Through our own choices and efforts, our home is becoming a house that in two days (bankers willing) will become someone else’s home.
We have been somewhat taken by surprise at the difficulty of disassembling the physical manifestations of nearly two decades of our lives at 259 Richards Road (goodness, what did we expect?). These walls are lacquered with the most important years of our lives – our children, grown and launched on their own trajectories, many years of Thanksgiving dinners with otherstemporarily exiled from home or country, and the precious friendships of parenting, poker games, and the patina of shared everyday lives.
Some of those friends gathered us in for a farewell last evening, and the affection and care shown us in those hours will sustain us through the wrenching uprooting of the coming days, and perhaps, too, help amend the rocky Pacific Northwest soils we hope will be hospitable to our divided hostas and hearts.
We embark on our westward adventure with both deep sadness and hopeful expectation. No time in national memory has been so fraught with uncertainty, and on this we overlay our own transitional insecurities. But we leave our home of many years with confidence that our place in the hearts of our friends is secure. Thank you, all.
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