The Rest Was Silence

I'm quietly sitting in Lisa and Gregory's living room in Mosier, OR. I can hear distant cars on the highway, the occasional train, and if I stand up I can see a little light reflecting on the Columbia River. It is so peaceful here. I love to visit their house. The kids and Elijah have gone to bed in the trailer which is set up outside. The faintest smell of fall is in the air. Gregory has been harvesting pumpkins from their patch. We are only an hour from Portland, our final destination, but it is so calm and comfortable here that we have decided to stay a couple days before moving on to the end of the journey. Mosier feels like the very beginning of the Pacific Northwest. The desert wasteland of the last several days lasted just until about two bends in the river before Mosier. When you get here suddenly there are trees, and the air has more moisture, and the little town is beautiful and filled with little flower gardens. It's a small town with a good local coffe shop (probably the reason Elijah is excited to stay), and two boys near Eli and Izzy's age who live in the house in front of this house. We couldn't have asked for a better soft landing. Allowing us to inch our way back into reality, shake a little of the dust off, and prepare for our next big adventure, finding a house to live in and getting the kids into a new school. We've been on the road for two months. What a ride we've had. We have seen so many sights, visited so many people, driven through so many states, all in our little mini-van with the whole family close in together the whole way. I've shared a lot of the adventure in these blog entries, with pictures of the sights, and thoughts about the state of country. What I didn't share as much of was the squabbles, and tantrums, the late night melt downs, the fever of being in the car too long, the moments when all the kids were homesick at the same time and wanted to go back to SB, the times when I had to struggle to entertain the kids get Elijah work space and get us to the next city five hours away. It's been a really intense experience, there are memories we will always have, and a lot of them are good. And now we are all ready to stop living out of the car.

One of the greatest things about this moment in Lisa and Gregory's living room in Mosier, OR is that nobody else is here, I am all alone in the house and the silence is blissful.