Our biggest news in the past 26 years is that we have moved from our Homestead Ranch. It has been a bitter sweet transition that is still on-going.  We have farm machinery to get ready to sell and in our effort to get moved before a forecasted huge storm (that did materialize!) we left behind car chains, my watch, our snow boots and maybe the check book because we can't seem to find it in our new home between Bend and Redmond in Central Oregon.

                For many of you who read Homestead this is likely a shock.  I never thought we'd leave the ranch that changed our lives, either.  The ranch brought me to Warm Springs, opened writing doors, connected us to family in miraculous ways and deepened our faith. Jerry always said he wanted to be buried there.

                 But things change.  There is a cost to everything.  The cost of maintaining the ranch, needing full time help to be there, the price of human fuel used just going to grocery shop 52 miles one way, watching Jerry's body  sink with his eleven crushed vertebrae, all added up.  We had purchased a not-new home earlier in the year thinking we'd one day retire near Bend closer to Jerry's doctor, a hospital (he was airlifted out of the ranch twice!) his brother, my nieces and nephew and many of our good friends from when we'd lived there before. After we returned from Greece, rested and reminded of the fleetingness of time (our trip was for Jerry's 80th birthday) we decided that rather than rent the house out, we should just move there ourselves.  We'd sold all the cows and even though Jerry bought 14 more in the spring, they'd gone to market after we returned from Greece.  We found the goat a new home and began packing.

                Our friend  Sandy, the container queen, arrived a few days before to help.  What a gift!  And Dennis and Sherrie Gant, the couple who spent 10 months with us building the homestead came down on moving day along with neighbors Ken and Arla Melzer and Matt and some hired helpers, too.

                  As the caravan of moving truck, Sherrie's truck, our car and Matt's car with Jerry driving moved up the ridge, I looked back.  I saw the river green from the recent rain, the mature trees planted so long ago that now hide the house 950 feet below the ridge and the moment struck me: coming back would never be the same.  I stopped at the top of the ridge unable to go on, just weeping.  Jerry pulled up behind me and I ran back to him and said how hard this was, how sad I was that we were leaving behind a place filled with a thousand memories, as many as there are river rocks at the bottom of the John Day River.  For a moment I wondered if we were doing the right thing.  Jerry held me and said it would never be the same when we came back but that it was time.  He hoped he hadn't "waited to long" to make some of the other memories he wanted to make.  "We have the rest of our lives," he reminded me, "for new adventures and we'll do it together. It's a blessed move," he said. 

                And I do see God in this is so many ways.

We are happy, even in the chaos of boxes everywhere, addresses to change, service to acquire (we watched a garbage truck come and pick up our green rolling tub, so exciting not having to drive 4 miles to the dumpster near the neighbor's barn at the top of the ridge) and discovering new  routines.  PB, our tabby cat, was neutered four days before we moved so he's really had a shock but adjusted quite well.  He's become an indoor cat, his great desire for years.  The dogs are developing new routines and have discovered a deer trail just beyond the fence where they have occasional encounters, almost nose to nose through the fence. 

                Our caravan arrived at dark and we slept the night on an air mattress in the house.  The next morning, Matt drove the truck and horse trailer full of my books and along with more friends, family (my niece and her husband) Bob and Nancy Noble our genealogist friends met during the writing of A Name of Her Own and Jerry's brother and his wife (who along with friends Blair and David Fredstrom) brought us food, we unloaded.  Jerry's back was pretty bad and he rested on the air mattress we'd slept on and when the bed was set up, he moved onto that.  We worked around him.  It was grand to have such good help at both ends and to know he could just rest.

                We have 2.3 acres instead of more than 100 at the ranch. Our home is blessed by the people who lived here before us.  They had two dogs, too, and the yards are all fenced for them.  They loved the natural world and left behind a soothing pond, a swing, bird feeders everywhere, landscaping that brings the outdoors inside.  There is even a labyrinth, a faithful walking path that was for me, when we saw the house, the deciding feature telling me this was where we should move to.  It's a single story house only slightly larger than the home we built on the river.  It's on a cul de sac so pretty quiet and as I write this I look out the window not at the rocky ridge and the river but a rhododendron and an apple tree and the sun shining on the labyrinth's rock lined path beneath a juniper.  And yes, I can see a portion of a neighbor's home, a neighbor who brought in our mail, watered plants left in our care for the previous owners  and who told us there is public land close by where we can walk the dogs.

We will be discombobulated for a time, we know.  It is the nature of transition.  But in a verse from Isaiah where God "passes before" Moses in the wilderness, I found comfort in  knowing that as with moving to the ranch all those years ago, amazing things beyond our wildest imagination are in store for us: trials and joys.  But God has passed before us and we are not alone.  That's the best thing about transitions, they remind us of that.

                We still have the ranch.  We have an offer and depending on the results of our conversations, it may well become a piece of public land accessible to anyone willing to risk the reptile road.  For now, we'll be going back and forth finishing things and savoring the memories of lives changed because we took that risk and drove the road twenty-six years ago. Thank you all who savored Homestead for you came with us.