UGONANY #AtoZChallenge

Notes about this challenge:
The A to Z Challenge is to write to the letters of the alphabet in order, one a day each day in April, except on Sundays.
To find more A to Z Challenge blog posts, click on any A to Z Challenge link I've made in this post. Read through the comment links on that page and see what interests you.  Read.  Comment. Spread the love of our alphabet around!
If you are commenting here, please include your post's link so that I can return the visit easily.  I'd like to visit your site, if you don't mind! If you want to see where I've visited, click on A to Z Challenge in the tab at the top and it will take you to a padlet of links.  If you want to see yours there, visit me.  If you are doing the A to Z Challenge, I'll visit you and link you. 
  PS:  If I don't get to your site today or this week, for a visit, my post today explains WHY!
It is also Tuesday's Slice of Life at Two Writing Teachers where there are more links to snippets of life from teachers.

You Go Nannie!

We are moving this week:

madly dusting,

quietly fussing,

silently cussing;

Decluttering

while recluttering,

sputtering

 muttering

puttering;

Wrapping up my life,

taking pieces of it and

giving it away

to other lives -

We don’t need mugs for

every day of the year;

We don’t need towels for

every possible extremity

or calamity,

We don’t need ten chairs

in our kitchen of two bodies.

We will bring

just what we need

and nothing more,

Except maybe my mandolin

that sits by the door

that I still can’t play.

But maybe

in this new place

its mellow tones will grace

that shore.

by Donna JT Smith

I had this plate, too.  It has the same message.










 

By Sunday night, we should be in Friendship.  We have spend the past 18 years in Georgetown.  When we first got here it was an adventure living out on an island just a few miles from the beach.  Every night coming home from school, I crossed over three bridges to get to our island home we had built.  I got to see what vacationers see when they come:  the beauty in the rock ledges, the tall white pines, the rivers, the sandy beaches.  I got to see what the vacationers don't see: the inside of the little school, the town transfer station, the wildness of the beach in winter, the grounded lobster boats wintering on shore, the lobstermen repairing traps and painting buoys, the April day of the osprey couple's return from Jamaica, the departure of the osprey in fall.
When we first moved here there was a family of moose we might encounter at night as they strolled along the edge of our dark (no streetlights) road, browsing on the young birch and other wonderful greens.  Sometimes one would look in our big picture window to see what we were doing.
There were terrible mosquitoes, wasps and ticks, too.  But over the years, all these creatures seem to have disappeared for the most part.  No more moose stroll through, and the biting insect population seems to have gone down.
We had no squirrels for many years, but for the past five years there have been a couple of gray squirrels, a couple of reds (one with a partial tail), and some ground squirrels that have all helped tear up the blue tarp that covered our old lawn tractor to use the lining for their nests.
The deer and turkeys are plentiful and entertain us as they pass through, finding things to eat.  It is a safe spot for them, and they don't mind too much the barking of the dog.  The owls that visit us sit still and watch our comings and goings.  Once when my grandchildren were here, a pair of them sat in a tree branch over our driveway.
We had a grouse who came to visit and stay for a season.  He'd appear each time we came out of the house to follow us around the yard, tug on our pant legs and chase the car down the driveway each time we left the house. 

We said good-bye to our church family on Sunday, though we will be there off and on for special days or when family visits there.  But the church is over two hours away from us now.  We began going when my father died and my mother had no way to get there.  We drove her every Sunday from 2001 to 2003.  And when she died, we kept on going - over an hour's drive each way every Sunday.

I will miss all of this.  I won't be sitting by the same window as I type my blog, create my poems, paint my world.  My drive will still have the ocean, but not the same look.  I'll still have a chair by a window, but there will be no deer, turkeys or owls.  Seagulls will replace the owls.  I don't know what new moments we will make in our new home, but I'm sure they will be ones we could never have dreamed of.  It will be good, too.  Just different.

We bought this new house five and a half years ago. We've been slowly having work done on this "House with the Wrinkled Wall".  It is almost finished becoming a house that can become our home.

Retirement.
It has fully set in.

U - Go - Nannie.
You go.

What will be next?