Leaving Simple Life for Conveniences

Fall colors on the Poconos along the Delaware River as seen from
our Barryville apartment.


If you’ve packed and moved at least once in your lifetime, you promise yourself not to repeat the process often. Before you know it, someone has to move to a new location, another is flooded out and has to rip home down to the studs, requiring extensive packing by many friends, then someone else has to get out of Dodge and you're the only one to help--it doesn’t matter for whom or what, packing is kin to having a bad case of influenza. You're left with no energy and little enthusiasm for EVER packing again.

We've been packing second son’s storage items and moving them to his property and preparing to leave our Sheds. Our packing is putting clothing in a safe box and covering furniture with sheets to keep out dust. We've learned quickly that living simply equates possessing fewer of everything. Our Blazer will be loaded with excess of everything we thought we'd need in the woods, but don't.

Leaving one place for another brings some kind of renewed spirit. Like my cousin’s move from his home of over 20 years to a rental near his son. He hated leaving his cozy home for a trip across town to a new residence. However, he felt a spark of interest in having this new home despite no longer sharing with his wonderful wife, now deceased. We’ll find that spark of interest when we arrive home to greet our cat Bobbisox, admire the autumn lawn, check out our maple trees, walk through the house to remind ourselves that nothing has changed, and finally settle down in our comfortable living room to check the fall schedule of television programs. (After all, we've seen little of the tv set in the last three months.)How quickly will we slip into old habits, renew friendships in the neighborhood, and day by day scrounge through three months’ mail, discarding the gillions of accumulated catalogs. Our NY friends will communicate via email, reminding us how fortunate we are not to be spending the winter in the East.

We have the best of both worlds and we appreciate that fact.