On leaving

I am packing up my country house outside the small town where I served a church for the last several years. We have a buyer and are scheduled to close next week. I no longer have a church, the horse has gone to Georgia, and there is really nothing left for me in the small town except this country house. I really enjoyed living here. But it is time to go.

Each day I drive up from the city and clean up and pack up. This week it has been sunny and the afternoons have been warm. I can still sit out on the back porch and look out over the grassy pasture and eat lunch. No wildflowers this time of year! The grass is neatly cut and, while still green, isn't growing. The vegetable garden that produced such a bounty of tomatoes and squash in the early summer is now overgrown with tall weeds, killed by a light frost a few weeks ago. A good round with the tiller, and the garden will be ready to go again. I hope the new owners will plant a garden here. I will really miss it.

In the evenings as I pack up to go, the stars are bright in a black sky. The moon is waxing and will be full in a few days. Venus is huge in the west these days. You can almost tell it is a planet and not a star. Mars is yellowish red, high in the east in the early evening. Orion's belt also rises in the east. I'm not sure about the other constellations. But I won't get to see this vivid display when I go back to the city. The houses are too close together, and yes, we do have streetlights again -- at least in my neighborhood, and I am NOT complaining about having them.

I will miss my quiet mornings sitting on the porch at daybreak with my coffee, surrounded by the cats. I will miss the sun streaming in the kitchen window and the Knockout rose I planted in the bed outside the window (recommended by my friend the Consulting Rosarian with the American Rose Society). I hauled it home from a nursery in Georgia a few springs ago, when I got sick on the road and spent a weekend holed up in a hotel room feeling too bad even to go outside. Not too many hotel rooms have their very own potted rose bush by the sliding glass door! My friend the consulting rosarian says to get another Knockout rose for my yard in New Orleans. Thanks, I think I will. P.S., the rose is blooming right now, in mid-December, in South Louisiana.

I hate moving. But I don't know anyone who admits to liking it. I will be glad when this is over.

Pastor Kathy