Here it is more than a week after our daughter and new son’s move to Ohio, and I’ve yet to do more than address it in passing. Perhaps that means that I move much slower than my daughter who is the blur zipping around the kitchen in this picture.

The move was fairly uneventful, except for the part when the first apartment was so gross that Anne – along with Hiram’s step-brother – went to battle with the rental agency and got out of the lease. But we weren’t there yet and never saw the inside of the gross apartment, only the inside of the one they moved into. It’s nice, in a poor graduate student kind of way, clean, with lots of light, and much bigger than the basement apartment they lived in last year.

You should know that I did not cry once, not even when we left and I knew our daughter would be 10+ hours away from home. Oh, I wanted to cry. But I kept the vow I made in 1978 when Mom, my uncle and two cousins helped Hiram and I moved to the wilds of South Dakota, 12+ hours away from my childhood home.

My mother’s reaction to our tiny, wild town was more than over the top, even after taking the neighbor’s six half-wolf dogs chained to posts across the street into consideration. Mom and I shared a bedroom the night before the moving crew headed home. (Hiram was working at the boys’ ranch overnight.) Every time the neighbor’s wolf dogs barked, and they barked about every five minutes, she sobbed, “Oh, I can’t leave my little girl here,” or “Jolene, what have you done?” or just, “Oooohhhhh, no.”

Not pretty.
Not the encouragement I needed.
Not a good memory.
Hence my vow.
Which I kept.
And am still keeping.

I have yet to cry, even though
the first job Anne found turned out to be not so great,
her job search is frustrating,
she misses Iowa’s landscape horribly,
she and her hubby are finding the adjustment to a big university harder than expected,
and their neighborhood is noisy at night,
what with the police and fire stations down the street.
Not quite barking wolf dogs chained to posts, so I will not cry.

Instead, I’ll remember how much we learned our first year far from home. I’ll think of the lifelong friends we made. I’ll be thankful that Anne and her hubby are less than a half hour from Uncle Mike, Aunt Brenda, and Grandma Glenna. And I’ll call now and then, to encourage them.

“You’ll be fine,” I’ll say.
“God has a plan for your lives, and this is part of it,” I’ll say.
“You’re going to make it,” I’ll say.
And because those words are true, I will not cry.