It’s not even 9 am, but our home has been buzzing with activity for a few hours already. My husband is in his office ( a smallish corner of our bedroom), working away at his job. A few months ago he changed who he worked for and cut his commute time from 30+ minutes to only about 30 seconds. It’s been a change, but a good one, and we love having him nearer to us.
The kids are all upstairs right now. The two older ones have officially been on summer break for 3 days now and are loving every minute of it. I can hear them playing quietly in their rooms. They were sent up with the instructions to clean the rest of the mess left over from yesterday’s escapades, but all is well for now as long as they’re playing nicely. and give me a break long enough to type this up and drink my coffee.
It looks like it’s going to be another beautiful almost-summer day today. The windows are open letting in the cool morning breeze and ridding the house of the stale overnight air. Somehow, the mundane household chores seemed a little less annoying to complete, and (with a little help from the kids) have already accomplished quite a bit this morning.
I’m getting closing to my 40th birthday, and call it a mid-life change, or crisis, or just plain craziness, but the itch to pack up and move somewhere remote has been getting stronger. I’ve always dreamt of living somewhere remote. When I was a little girl, playing Barbie’s with my younger sister, we would pretend that they lived on a large ranch somewhere in the middle of Montana… or were stranded on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. When I was in my twenties and living in Europe, I dreamed of owning an old farmhouse… or a cottage on the Scottish coast. In my fantasy, both would have had walls that were thick and perfectly crooked, with a vintage little kitchen and a small wooden staircase that took me to the bedrooms upstairs.
The thing is though, I didn’t stay in Europe, and when I moved back Stateside, I moved back to the large, bustling suburbs of Chicago. When I met Ray, we followed out guts and moved northwest to the town that we’ve lived in these past 12 years. While it’s quieter and smaller than many of the suburbs closer to the city, it’s nothing near to the tiny town of 500 that I lived in for so many years in Germany. I’m not sure that we’ll ever live in a town that small, but I think that we’re both getting to the point where we want to leave the big city behind us… leave this state behind us, and move somewhere more interesting (and more affordable). This isn’t a new topic for the both of us, in fact, we’ve been playing around with the idea for years now.
Shortly after I met Ray, we followed out guts and moved to the town that we’ve been living in these past 12 years. While it’s quieter and smaller than many of the suburbs nearby, it’s nothing like the tiny town of 500 that I lived in for so many years in Germany. I’m not sure that we’ll ever live in a town that small, but I think that we’re both getting to the point where we want to leave the big city behind us… leave this state behind us, and move somewhere more interesting (and more affordable). This isn’t a new topic for the both of us, in fact, we’ve been playing around with the idea for years now. The problem is that we haven’t found the place that makes both of our hearts sing… so we continue to look… and dream… with high hopes that one day soon we will find “THE PLACE”.
Who knows… maybe we’ll find our bliss in the mountains… or maybe it’ll be on a sandy beach.