\tAll our stuff should fit in the container to go back to the States. That\u0092s the assessment of the guy from the moving company who came to the house today to survey how much we have (while hopefully ignoring the piles of laundry waiting to be done and the mounds of Polly Pockets invading nearly every corner of the house). He was efficient and calm. He left me with a folder full of paperwork (in English) and instructions to fill it out before the come to pack.<\/p>\n
\tWe\u0092ve known for months that we\u0092d be moving back sometime this year. The shoe dropped right around Christmas. Just in time for the bargain Christmas ski week I booked to seem like a let down, since it turned out to be our last Christmas ski vacation in Europe. <\/p>\n
\tA strange thing happens when the powers-that-be open the door to the possibility of leaving France… even just the tiniest bit. You grab that door handle and do what you can to wrench it open.. pulling as hard as you can because suddenly nothing… absolutely nothing… is more important. You\u0092re done. Learning French, struggling with French, putting up with drivers on your street who don\u0092t even make an attempt to share the road with you. It\u0092s all the stuff you\u0092ve just grown to tolerate and suddenly, you don\u0092t have to. Or you think you don\u0092t have to. And you don\u0092t. You can\u0092t. It\u0092s beyond you. You are entirely focused on one thought: returning to the US. Because with all its problems, it\u0092s better. Way better.<\/p>\n
\tIt happened out of the blue. For months, Bill\u0092s boss had been telling him how they wanted him to stay. Then one night Bill called from his car to say he was on the way home and, oh by the way, we are all on our way \u0093home.\u0094 I hung up and felt sorta numb. I didn\u0092t know what to do first. So I wrote a list on my write-on\/wipe-off board: the places I still wanted to see and hadn\u0092t yet. Normandy, Florence, Norway, Ireland, Nice and Monaco, Austria. We won\u0092t get to all of them. But we\u0092re doing our best to chip away at the list… even planning a trip to Ireland on our way \u0093out.\u0094 We did Italy in February. Nice is booked for Easter weekend. And that\u0092s it. We\u0092re out of time. And now I find myself looking at the money spent on hotels and airline tickets as money that I could spend on new furniture for a house I haven\u0092t bought yet in a city I\u0092ve never been to. <\/p>\n
\tI\u0092ve reached the point in the move where I\u0092m sick to my stomach nearly all the time. I get a good night\u0092s sleep about 3 nights a week. My to-do list feels like it\u0092s crushing me. (That one I fix by just spending entire days downtown lunching with friends and wandering the city. Take that crazy list!)<\/p>\n
\tBut the sleepless nights (I sometimes wake up to find myself grinding my teeth), the constant pain in my stomach, the feeling that I\u0092ll never be able to get it all done… I welcome it all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
All our stuff should fit in the container to go back to the States. That\u0092s the assessment of the guy from the moving company who came to the house today to survey how much we have (while hopefully ignoring the piles of laundry waiting to be done and the mounds of Polly Pockets invading nearly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}