Out!

New Years Day and if we were the relaxing sort, we would be relaxing because we had completed moving out of our British Columbia house and returned safely and sanely to Point Roberts.  Not an easy move, all things considered including our advanced years.  We are considerably in debt to our friends who brought their trucks/vans up and over to move the boxes and who came to pick up the remnant goods in the dark on Thursday night, with a promise to bring them down to us next time they come this way.

Our Canadian neighbors, both here in Point Roberts and in Roberts Creek, B.C., have been, every step of the way, helpful in every conceivable way.  Barry and Lynda, who watched out for the house when we weren't there all those years and who mowed the lawns for us in our absence over this past summer when it was for sale; Don and Jean, who took us in for Christmas every year, who offered their truck for many problems for which a truck is the only answer, and who the first day we moved in got our moving truck unstuck; Tom and Lorinne who have answered every call even when we were not sure we needed to call.  I've never had such neighbors in the U.S.   Maybe just chance, but maybe Canadians are just really kinder and more generous than we are down here to the south, crazed as we still are with conquering whatever is in front of us.

We left the house looking like the Joads on their way from Oklahoma to California in the 1930's, car jammed full with boxes and then finally just loose goods; boxes and things tied to the roof rack.  A young deer came round shortly before we left and while I stood there, he ate all the buds of a rhododendron bush, as if to say, 'Take that! You quitter!"  Paid no attention whatsoever to my urging him to move on.  "Move on, yourself."  Yes.  Yes.  That's exactly what we are doing.  Someone else will have to protect the rhododendron and hydrangea buds now.

A dark, clear, starry sky and freezing temperatures accompanied us southward on the ferry and through Vancouver.  When we arrived at the Point Roberts border crossing, one of the CPB agents we have known for years was there to greet us.  "Bringing anything in tonight?" he queried, before he noticed that we were bringing virtually everything in tonight.  Ed explained that this was the last of our goods from our Canadian house that we had just sold.  "Oh, well, yeah," he said.  "Welcome home.  And the computer says I have to look under your hood."  So we struggled, all three of us, to find the hood release  button, and he checked under the hood.  Then, waved us through with the comforting news that "You've still got a motor there."

And we were Out, or perhaps In.