It’s time to talk about something huge happening in our lives right now.  Last January Adam came from St. Louis to interview for jobs here in Utah.  He had 3 interviews, and immediately had 2 good offers.  The 3rd offer (his top choice) took weeks to come, then more weeks until the contract was signed.  That signing happened a few weeks ago, and that signing put started a large ball rolling.

When you go away on missions, you learn to live in small little apartments with only those things that fit into your 2 suitcases.  When you return home, you roll your eyes around over all the things you possess and wonder why you have so much and why you need so much space to live.  Every time we’ve returned, we’ve tried to thin out the things in our home.  And we’ve talked of down-sizing.

Our son, Adam, with his growing family (5 kids so far) have been in Missouri for the last 9 years, as he’s completed medical school and now his residency, which ends in June.  He and Heidi have expressed an interest in buying our home to raise their family here.

That thought became reality a few weeks ago when he signed a contract to work in Pleasant Grove, 20 minutes from here.  We are thrilled for him.  But suddenly our moving away became real.  The first few nights I didn’t sleep, wondering how I could leave a home we built 32 years ago, a home where we raised our family  a home that holds every family memory.  I lay in bed, realizing that we had 4 months to pack up our lives and  go somewhere else.  I tried not to cry.  I tried not to feel overwhelmed.  It felt like my entire life of STUFF kept flashing before my eyes, as I thought about my office, my quilt rooms, our living spaces, and all the memories held here.

I also worried about where we would go.  How would we ever find a place we love as much as we love this home??  We started looking.  We walked through newly built and older homes that were for sale.  Nothing felt right.  We looked at dozens of homes online, trying to imagine living in them.  We found nothing.  My anxiety grew and I didn’t sleep much.

Then on 28 February, we walked through a model home in north east Orem.  The outside wasn’t terribly impressive, but when we walked through the door, we both immediately felt and expressed the same words, “I could live here!”  This home had everything we were looking for.  It felt like a gift to us.

Things moved rather quickly after that.  We met with the builder, we selected a lot, we met with the designer who works with the builder, and we got serious about packing up our stuff.  My heart flipped from heavy to almost giddy overnight.

So we are moving.  Adam’s family will arrive in July and they will move into our family home.  We will move over to the Farm House while our new home is built.  We should be moved in by November.  We will have a glorious summer living next door to 5 beautiful grandkids as Adam and Heidi settle in and we exit.

Life is good.  We are happy.  The change in our home place is hard for all of us, but in the end, it will be the best possible scenario for our whole family.  We are thrilled that our family compound will stay in the family.  We are happy to be forced to organize and thin out all of our stuff.  We will be happy to go to a home we can easily live in for the rest of our our lives.  I’ll have an office for my family history work.  I’ll have a large sewing studio.  John will have a much smaller yard to care for.  We will have beautiful views of Mt. Timpanogos and we will live across the street from a cemetery.  It will be lovely.

So for now, we carry on, thinning out our things, hauling carloads of stuff to Deseret Industries, passing things on to friends and family, and we dream of what’s ahead.

This is the little development we are moving into, lot #13 at the top.  It backs up to the Murdock Trail and the old WordPerfect campus and is just west of Orem Cemetery.