Sing out, O Muse!

I will begin with some of the usual reporting of our family and our life in the ordinary. But there is something extraordinary in this post. There has been something extraordinary in our lives, and it is filling every ordinary moment we're having with electricity. I am working on increasing my appetite for joy, and yet staying in the moment. It's a work in progress.

On Palm Sunday I dropped Jon off at the airport in Colorado Springs at 6:15, and then took the kids to church for their children's choir performance. It was extremely lovely! I'm grateful for the saint who is working with them and has revived the children's choir. I know it's been enriching for them.

Spirit Week at the middle school contained a couple of days without Jon, but I wasn't going to miss an opportunity to practice retro hairdos! Tuesday was 20s day, Wednesday was 50s day:
Friday was 80s day! You know I had a totally rad time with that.

So many thanks to Dad and Agnes, who remembered our 12th Anniversary and sent us flowers on Good Friday. They are still fresh and filling our room with spring aroma. I realized it's been many years since I've had flowers in my house. I've been trying to grow the same four jars of beans since November, and still failing, so I tend to think of plants as things that would be better off without me around them... But what am I going to do, kill the cut flowers? I should buy flowers more.
Easter was delightful. We got up early, as is our custom, to go to church for the earliest possible service. I was disappointed that it wasn't a vigil service, though, but an ordinary mass! It just started in candlelight. Next year I will be sure to find a vigil; that's my favorite service of the year. For the first time, we attended a church that had an Easter Egg hunt, though! So that helped make up for it. I sang in the choir for the second service, which was fabulous! And then the romp began. The lovely woman who planned it got WAY too many eggs, so by the end they were begging the older children to help clear the eggs from the tot area. We still have plastic bags FULL of unopened eggs. But the kids felt like leprechauns at the end of a rainbow!                                                              Miles' third year in a row in an Easter dress. There are lots of people at our church who think we have two daughters, and that's fine with Miles. He says, he doesn't mind if people think he's a girl, but he corrects them because he just wants them to know that he IS a boy. He is and forever will be his own person.                                                                                              I had someone snap a picture as it had been a while since we'd had a family photo. Too bad it's so backlit, but it's otherwise pretty good!                              And then it was Easter Monday, and I was back at work for a teacher work day, planning with my teammate, when I got the texts from Jon, and we learned his mission out East had been successful: Geneseo had offered him a job!

Geneseo, where Jon will work.

And at last the terrible suspense in which we'd been living for weeks was ended, and the dream became real. We are moving to Rochester this summer!

Rochester, where we'll live

 My children will live near their Grandfather (and nearer to their other Grandparents), with their cousins, with their aunts and uncles, with so many friends I have loved my while life. My children will play in Lake Ontario every summer and see the real autumn leaves and play in the deep snow and smell the lilacs in May. I will get to live near Leah, in the place where I grew up, where anytime I go to Wegmans I might run into someone I've known since childhood. I still can't believe this is real; I have wanted this for so long! In two months, we'll be done with the school year and the packing will get serious; Jon's first day of his new job will be June 28th!

Some celebration was in order. Time for another visit to our favorite celebration place. Jon and I first visited Tres Margaritas on our recon visit in 2016 and it's been a favorite place for birthdays and family time. We got to have another evening of mariachi and Mr. Magic!
 
                                    I am trying to pump as much love into my last two months here as I can. I'm trying to stay present with my sixth graders (it's HARD, man; I am so over this school year!) even while I'm applying for jobs. I'm trying to cherish my runs with Koopa around town, the gorgeous views, even while I'm compulsively checking Zillow and worrying about how we're ever going to get our house sell-ready while we're still living in it and working full time (any tips for this appreciated, Melissa!). I'm trying to enjoy ordinary things, like our choir anthem today or our trip to Home Depot with Adele's Daisy troop yesterday.                                               Or in another trip to El Pueblo Museum to buy Pueblo paraphernalia at the gift shop while Adele played in the teepee and with the chuck wagon.



I'm alternately exultant, and then worried. All my anxieties are spiking; something is bound to go wrong, right? Melissa gave me a valuable reminder via this Brene Brown clip: this inability to accept and enjoy the good, and constant fear that it will somehow be taken away, this is just my unwillingness to be vulnerable. And if you can't be vulnerable, you can't be happy. Ever.

I'm going to open my heart, like Ruth in A Raisin in the Sun:

RUTH  (Struck senseless with the news, in its various degrees of goodness and trouble, she sits a moment, her fists propping her chin in thought, and then she starts to rise, bringing her fists down with vigor, the radiance spreading from cheek to cheek again) Well—well!—All I can say is—if this is my time in life—MY TIME—to say good-bye—(And she builds with momentum as she starts to circle the room with an exuberant, almost tearfully happy release).... then I say it loud and good, HALLELUJAH! AND GOOD-BYE MISERY ... I DONT NEVER WANT TO SEE YOUR UGLY FACE AGAIN! (She laughs joyously, having practically destroyed the apartment, and flings her arms up and lets them come down happily, slowly, reflectively, over her abdomen, aware for the first time perhaps that the life therein pulses with happiness and not despair).

Ok, so my life in Pueblo has NOT been misery, or anything comparable to a roach-infested southside Chicago apartment. But I admire how when the good news came, Ruth just opened up to it and let it fill her up. 

Jon meets with a realtor this week. We leave in two months. Allons-y!

(Odysseus arriving in Ithaca)