I should write down all that moving overseas entails - from the packing and choosing what goes. To the emotional aspects of radically changing my whole life and culture and everything I know. And that's a GREAT thing.... all of our stories are written differently, some of us are meant to get married and live in cul-de-sacs and breed. Others are meant to be these rugged hard-core people that can live on one pair of pants and tree-bark. I like to think I fall somewhere in the middle!
So, as I pack up my life - and go through the triage of the choosing (triage is definitely my word of the month!), I think - TEN BOXES! Not dis-similar to one of my favourite episodes of The West Wing where Josh was trying to get the Presidential platform down to ten words. A life in ten boxes. When one merely moves from house to house - there is generally the paring down and the salvation army drop-offs. When one is moving to a place where Target or even Tesco's is not readily available - on the whole other side of the world, it requires introspection. And naturally, since I have the apparent attention span of a baby-goldfish, it requires focus: to sift through the memories.
There's my smokey bear I had from back when I was four - recently returned to my possesion. The russian inkwell shaped like a bear's head -I picked that up in the market in Ekaterinburg and talked the guy down to 500 rubles from 700. Little pieces of me - little altars everywhere that tributes my core and my passion for my family, my friends, my Lord... grief, but I just could sit amidst of pile of "stuff" all day. And remember.
To quote my old friend Dis. "It's a good life, it's a great life, it's green and wild and it's fine..."
