Last Days in Maryland

With many activities filling our time, and occasional snowstorms providing excitement, our last days in Maryland swirled by too quickly.  It was suddenly time to leave.

We gave a tour of the cottage to the next family to move in.  I wish we had it on video.  All members of our family enthusiastically contributed to the tour, providing insights into life in the cottage.  One child exclaimed how horrible the water tasted and grabbed a drinking glass stained orange to prove its potency.  Another demonstrated how the stairs are way steeper than housing codes allow.  Quirk after quirk was shown.  'If you spill something in the kitchen, it rolls down to this corner over here.'  'If you use the microwave when the back porch lights are on, you'll need to flip this fuse over here.'  And you know what?  We were all grinning as we showed off these things.  We were sharing a place that we knew and that we loved and that we were proud of.  And I think our enthusiasm was contagious.  The family left with big smiles and moved in shortly after we left!

Since we had come to the cottage with only the essentials, it was hard to pack.  We brought the things we need and use.  Since we were needing and using these things, we could do very little packing ahead of time.  But eventually, piles began to form.

We had piles like this:

in which our stuff sat confidently under a sign that said, "THINGS THAT NEED TO COME".

But what everyone worried about was a growing pile under the sign "THINGS WE WOULD LIKE TO TAKE BACK TO SEATTLE BUT THAT AREN'T ACTUALLY CRITICAL TO OUR FAMILY'S LIFE AND HEALTH AND HAPPINESS".

To help ensure that the "THINGS THAT NEED TO COME" would actually fit in the van, we packed up several boxes of books and shipped them at the cheaper media rate.

Moving Day

Jon packed and repacked our stuff into the van.  There was fresh snow and ice everywhere, which made it tricky to do this!  In fact, the front door had frozen shut overnight!  See how hard it was for us to leave Maryland?  We literally had to push our way out.  (And pull our way into the van since the van doors had frozen shut, too!)  Jon hauled boxes out to the van, hauled them back, balanced boxes on the front seat for a while....

In the end, the whole "NEEDS TO COME" pile and even some of our "THINGS WE WOULD LIKE TO TAKE BACK TO SEATTLE BUT..." pile made it in the van!  Superior skills!

Then it was time to clean out the fridge, which, thankfully, wasn't too big of a task.  I had been very careful not to have a kitchen cleaning fiasco like last time. 

 There was some leftover wine, though, which needed to be finished.  At 10 am. 

Much to the worries of those around me, my strategy for the rest of our food was to throw it all into a pot of soup.  (Despite how it looks, it was actually really good because the freezer leftovers included meat and flavourful broth.  We gobbled it all up!)




With our stuff packed and all of our food gone, it was time to say goodbye to the little things in our cottage that we had come to love.  

Goodbye to the kitchen storage containers that came with the house ....



...and isn't this lamp fantastic?  I read by this lamp every night. 

 

Ah, yes.  And goodbye to the very stylish placemats.  That are REVERSIBLE!  Gotta love the 1970s.  




My husband, I'm sure, is going to miss this chandelier that jumped out at his head many a time....

And farewell to a gorgeous front yard.....the view that I saw from my bedroom window in the mornings. 

Goodbye, Cottage! 

And we climbed into the van which was full to the brim, and headed west.