Drum roll, please

We’ve dug. Deep. Deep into our desires for our life. Deep into our hopes for our future. And deep into our pockets to fund two graduate degrees. And now it is time to write the next chapter. Or blog.

The news: We’ve decided to rank New Orleans as our top pick for Phil’s residency program. We will know if we have “matched” there on Friday, March 16. Our chances are pretty good.

I’ve been holding off blogging all together this week because most of my blogable moments have to do with incidents, conversations, tears, and mishaps relating to this transition. I’ve started to write this entry several times. I’ve written sentences like, “While we will be sad to leave Boston,...” and “Can’t wait to see you at Jazzfest 2007!” None of these sentences, which I deleted as quickly as I jabbed them into my keyboard, really do our decision justice.

The billing on my blog says that this blog is about a year of digging deep. We have done a lot of that and I have written about of very little of it, because it is a private process and this is, of course, rather public. But at the end of the day, we are going to New Orleans because we feel drawn/pulled/called there. We want to be locals among locals. We want to pitch in. We want to learn something from the pace of New Orleans and the resolve of those we have been able to make it back to rebuild. We want to live by family.

And we’re in mourning. We simply are in denial about leaving our friends. Our neighborhood is perfect. We walk. Yesterday we walked to the pool for a swim and then Sumner and Phil walked to the library for Chess Club and Ramona and I walked home for lunch and then over the salon to have my hair done. Phil and Sumner walked to the grocery for a snack, picked up Monie at the salon and walked home. Later our friends, who live down the street, walked over with their kids for dinner. We love JP.

And we’re scared. We’re not scared about the things you’re probably scared of, like levies and hurricanes and rotten moldy buildings and Southern people, but we’re anxious about change on 100 different levels.

But we’re trusting ourselves and I believe that God has some sort of plan in this, so we’re going.

This week I’ve been putting things in boxes in an effort to get ready to put our house on the market. I call it packing. My friend Aaron, who lives behind us, asked me to stop saying that—it makes him too sad. So I started to call it de-cluttering. Later I talked to my friend Amy, who lives in New Orleans, she told me to “pack away”.

I want to go and I want to stay.