Christmas Eve

In 1976, I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in a hotel in Hong Kong. I was living in Micronesia at the time (on the island of Yap, which famously has stone money), so it made some sense to be somewhere else for that holiday, but Hong Kong, as far as I could tell, had very little idea about Christmas, and it was more like Christmas had been erased from the calendar.

This year, I am spending Christmas week on the Sunshine Coast, moving out of the log house we have lived in and loved for the past 20 years. It reminds me a great deal of that week in Hong Kong. I am in between worlds.  There is no Christmas for me.

When we first bought the house in B.C., we expected to live out our lives here. But in between the time we bought the house and our actual move up here, immigration law changed in Canada and B.C., and we were no longer eligible for permanent residency. And thus we began this two-decade cross-border residency, in which we went back and forth every two weeks between Roberts Creek, B.C., and Point Roberts, Washington.

We always knew that this move was likely to come to us, and now time and its commitment to age and mortality,  have brought us to the point where we need to make a full-time return to the U.S. We leave this wonderful house and community with many wonderful memories and with enormous gratitude for the opportunities the house and community gave us. And not only us, but also our five children and eight grandchildren, all of whom have their own memories of summer at the log house to take forward into their lives, many years in the future.

I've had a kind of nomadic life.  This is the twentieth time I have moved from one house to another in the past 55 years. Maybe the last such time. It is never easy, and yet there is always something to look forward to as well as to look back on, but mostly right now I am stuck on the looking back part. What an amazing twenty years this has been. We have been so lucky to have had this time, this place. And now, we need to hand it on,  entrust it to its new owners. We can only hope they will find as much joy and fun and 'hey, we won the lottery!' feeling as we have had here, every day of our lives... just every day.