Easter...

For Christians this weekend represents a time of remembered loss and of hope, a time of sad farewells and new beginnings.  It seems an appropriate time for us to begin our season of saying goodbye as we go into the start of a new chapter in our lives together.  After months of waiting, now everything seems to be moving so fast, we’re wondering how there will be time to fit everything in, but we do believe (and remind ourselves) that everything will happen when it’s supposed to.

We’ve had some interest in furniture this week - although nothing is out of the apartment yet, we still see that as a great thing!  Last night we took our double bed apart and wrestled the baseboard and box spring and mattress down the stairs and through a doorway cut for one slender person to fit through – nothing and no one broke! horray for more small miracles! - to be stored in our guest room for pick up tomorrow morning.  We’re so excited about our apartment emptying out!  Tomorrow also brings another Goodwill run – we wonder often how it is we came to have so much stuff that we don’t care to keep as we make trip after trip to our Goodwill.  The drop off attendant recognizes us now.  Strangely though, we feel more energized and happy about making donations than we do about making purchases.  We’ve been really working to simplify our lives over the last year, inspired partly the Peace Corps, partly by our church (http://www.riversideconnect.org/), and partly by our dream of retiring to a sail boat.  (If you’re curious, we found some good ideas and things to think about at rowdykittens.com – and how can you not love the name?)  The things we’ve decided to store for our return (thanks Dad!) each have a history or specific purpose to them, and we want to only carry things from place to place each time we move that hold memories and tell a story (okay, several pots and pans, sadly, have no story, but they’re really good).

We’re limited to two bags each, both not weighing more than 80 pounds together, and neither bag weighing more than 50 pounds alone.  It seems clothing will be easy and inexpensive to have made, so we’re bringing only a few good (sturdy yet professional) changes of clothes, and plan to have things that are appropriate to the culture and climate of our new home made for us once we get there.  We’ll have a journal and a camera, bibles, cumin, paprika, black pepper and Penzey’s Mural of Flavor (spices, on the other hand, are expensive and hard to come by!).  We’ll bring pictures of our families.  We’ll bring three months of toiletries to get us through our training period.  Our list continues, and once it’s final we’ll post that up so you can see what fits into four suit cases when you leave the country for two years!  We’ve read every Peace Corps packing list we can find, and figure it’s our duty to continue the tradition.  What would you bring if you could only pack two suit cases, and everything else had to be left behind?