Packing, Packing, Flying, Flying, Flying

Because spending nine weeks out of the country isn’t enough of a challenge, Ben and I decided to move in Lawrence to less-expensive digs… by August 1, about two days after we get back to the U.S. We’re excited about our new place—owned by a friend who is moving home to save money to buy land—and much more energy efficient and user-friendly for our needs—but we will miss our wonky house on Arkansas Street.

While I was studying abroad in college, my friend A.J. and I spent a week in Spain with my best friend, Kate, who was studying in Granada. About six days into that trip, (and very early into my first experiences with real culture shock) we happened upon a used book stall and I looked desperately for something written in English. The only book I could find was called “Star Signs: What Your Personal Horoscope Means about YOU” or something to that effect. I read excerpts out loud to Kate and A.J. all week, in a mocking tone, all the while secretly feeling that the book had some real truths to tell about my life as a Cancer—“You love cream and sauces” YES! “You are easily hurt” Yes, but don’t tell anybody. “You are naturally round in shape” Shut-up. “You frequently buy several of the same article of clothing because you are easily attached to comfort, continuity and your possessions.” True—especially the comfort bit, which reminds me of how irritated I am that I have to wear pants to fly.

Maybe it’s these truths thrust upon me by the heavens that make moving emotionally difficult for me—I like to feel like I could walk through my house in the dark and know exactly what I will encounter (as if I’d ever do that, ghosts and killers!) More likely, however, is that I’m attached to the memories of that house on Arkansas Street—it’s the house in which we lived when we were engaged, and where we held our engagement party (and ate Karen’s delicious hors d’ouerves); it’s the place I met Kate’s first child, hosted my first Christmas dinner for my family, and that housed upwards of a dozen different loved ones during the week of our wedding; it’s the place we lived when my cousins came to visit and we repeatedly rewound that scene in Nacho Libre where he punches the corn, “Get that corn OUTTA MY FACE” and laughed until I had to use my inhaler; it’s where we had a party for Ben’s birthday and watched the Carlson kids and Lily play in the backyard, and where we’ve hosted our beloved book club; it’s where we had the “all carbohydrate” birthday dinner for Autumn, and where I learned to cook, and where I cried when I spilled my fresh cherry limeade from the Farmer’s Market; it’s where the neighbor lady stops by to say “Hello” when she is walking her dog Chico and where a mother Robin put her nest last month for her chicks, who just left the nest last week; it’s where we get daffodils and bluebonnets each spring even though we didn’t plant them, and I will miss it.

On to this summer—this is supposed to be a travel blog, not a lame-ass moving blog!—our itinerary: I’m writing this from LAX as we await our flight to Brisbane. We’ve got four days at Byron Bay, eight on Ben’s folks’ farm outside Adelaide, two in Tasmania, and four in Melbourne. After a SOLID forty-eight hours at home, we fly to Edinburgh for about seventeen days (with a couple of T.B.A. weekend excursions in between) and to Glasgow for fourteen days. We head back to Edinburgh on the sixteenth of July, meet Caitlin, Cristin and Diane, and wing our way to Italy, with Esme in tow, on July twenty-second for eight days in the Cinque Terre and Vicenza with Kate , John and their boys. We’re back on the twenty-ninth of July to move house, and away to Toronto and Niagara in early August for a work conference. When we return, we’ll have just enough time to wash the travel from our clothes before Ben starts his program at KU and I start my fall semester, thankfully, back at Emporia. Come August we start celebrating weddings: Matt and Nadine, Jonathan and Jenn, Andrea and David, and Angela and Mike, and then 2009 is a memory, with Ben on his way to India at the start of the New Year.

We feel incredibly fortunate.

Between packing the house this week, we had a host of temporary goodbyes: To Mandy and Donovan as they prepare to move, to my folks’ as they pack for an Alaskan cruise, to Andrea and David while they plan their wedding, to Autumn as she gears up for summer and the arrival of her first niece, to Lindsey and Brandon who expect their fourth child while we are away, to my students and clients, to Carrie as she plans for India next month, to Wilcox who is going to keep the local food movement alive this summer in Kansas, between wrangling neurotic pre-engineering majors and their parents; to Aileen and Nathan while they celebrate being newlyweds, and to a certain couple who are putting in new floors before they get knocked up, and to Lawrence during the best time of the year to live there—when the Farmer’s Market is in full swing, and the students are gone, and the pool downtown gets so crowded that no one is actually just swimming, just bobbing in place and hoping that the kid next to them isn’t peeing in the pool.

We will miss our friends near and far this summer; the kind of people who never pee in the pool.

Love,
Robyn and Ben