This past week has been so hectic…All my best laid plans have been rearranged for me by Mother Nature. I’ d planned to have everything all zipped up so that when I walked out and shut the door Jennifer would be able to just pick up where I left off.. everything would be current on the books and taxes would be in an envelope to take to the CPA.. OOPS! Sorry Jennifer… best laid plans!!
The roads cleared on Thursday and I ended up making it to see Melia, my hair stylist. Bless her… she came in earlier than her usual time to work me in since the weather had messed up my appointment. I am now a chestnut brown… I still catch my image in the mirror and do a double take at the stranger looking back at me. This is what my hair color was when I was a sophomore in high school… boy is that ancient history!!!
I decided that we should have a big family dinner so that we could be together one last time before we leave. Marcy did not think she would make it home in time and the son-in-laws surely wouldn’t… and Joan and Charles were coming to say bye… so we sounded like a plan… with the ice and snow. We had sent Michael to the grocery on Wednesday for spaghetti fixin’s and Jennifer was doing the cooking. I baked the family fav cake and Kendall made a choco layer cake…dinner was delicious!!!!
Well I walked into Jennifer’s and Austin Brooklyn came around the corner and stopped dead in her path and asked the same question. Then the whole family was doing a double take… no one could remember this hair color as I have been a blonde for 35 years. It will take some time to get used to it… even Michael is not sure about it… it could be exciting…huh?
Thursday night was the beginning of the tears… It was when Brooklyn realized we were leaving… and not for just a week like last time. As I mentioned before… we have only talked around the actual going part. She broke into tears that flowed and flowed and nothing I could say would console her… One by one as the kids realized... the tears flowed. And as they cried …I cried.
My eldest Marcy is the most stoic of women… but when the time came to say goodbye to her… even she could not stop the flow of tears… and so we all had a cleansing cry. Jennifer had been quiet most of the evening… and after everyone had left… she too finally gave way to the emotion too….. I cry for them and I cry for me… and the excitement of this adventure in no way diminishes the sadness of leaving my children and grandkids.
But we still have the final goodbyes … Brooklyn and Kendall had been out of school so Marcy had stayed home with them… they were the first to arrive bearing gifts for the plane ride…( Poor Brook.. her tear ducts clogged up from the previous night’s flood and she had to get drops from the doctor. And Kendall was not feeling well either… running a bit of temp… living so close illnesses run through all the families several times before we get it knocked out.) Then the Kemp’s arrived… conversation was light .. we were all avoiding the real reason we were gathered this Friday afternoon…then our best friends, Connie and Dean arrived to pick us up… that is when the REAL set in… Wade was first to break down… then my ‘nothing bothers me’ granddaughter, Bailey … then it went downhill from there and we were all a mess… the tears flowed unabashed. We were all hurting and knowing, for the first time in any of our lives we would be separated by a distance we had never experienced before. We have never lived more than 45 minutes from each other… and now we were on a different continent on the other side of the world… that becomes an intense reality!!!
We loaded the Suburban with the bags that contained the balance of our necessities in China… we could not get the door closed… one after the other continued to stand on the running board for one more hug …… the ‘I love you’s’ and the ‘I will miss you’s’… this was the hardest moment of my life… as we drove down the lane to the gate… all of them stood in the driveway of our house… waving farewell….
We had barely gotten to HWY 175 when my cell phone rang… it was Brooklyn… that was to be the first of about 20 calls received between Brooklyn and Wade. It was the process they needed to come to terms with what was happening. They wanted a picture of PawPaw and I to be sent so they could see us. Skype was not going to be enough for them. They were struggling so if they wanted to call a 100 times I would have gladly taken each and every one of them. My heart was breaking for both them and for me.
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