I wrote this post back in October 2020, but never posted it. So much has happened since then!
We returned a week ago from a road trip to Idaho. The trip was an escape from California, which seemed like it was mostly on fire at the time we planned it. At this point we’d had about two months of constant smoke from wildfires and unbearable heat from wave after wave of high temps (including one week of 105+ days). Not to mention a pandemic that prevents us from going anywhere indoors. It was too hot even at the beach. That’s how you know things are bad.
We were pretty much trapped in our house with eight people and I was itching to go somewhere. Anywhere. We have friends in both North Idaho and southern Idaho that we’d been promising to visit for a while, so this seemed like the perfect time to make good on those promises.
When we arrived in Moscow where our first set of friends live, something clicked in me. Or more accurately, something broke in me. I felt cool, crisp air for the first time in what seemed like years. It smelled like fall… dew and leaves and a bit of smoke from a wood-burning stove (not from a thousand-acre wildfire). The longing for a cooler climate that I’d been feeling for years suddenly broke free and I couldn’t bury it anymore.
We looked up house listings (this is a common pastime for Californians, who find it entertaining to compare the low house prices in other parts of the country to our super inflated mortgages). It turns out that houses were pretty reasonable in Moscow (compared to California). In the span of about two days, the idea of moving out of California went from being a “someday” idea to a “Hey, we can actually do this now” idea.
The more we found out about Moscow the more we agreed it was a good idea. The people, the climate, the church. I looked up homeschooling groups. I didn’t find much in the way of a homeschool community, but I did find out about a Christian school for special needs children in Moscow called The Jubilee School. It looked like everything I’ve ever wanted for an education for my kids, special needs and otherwise. I arranged an appointment to talk to the director of the school on the phone, which happened during our drive home. I talked to a few parents of children that attend the school. It was then I realized that maybe this school was the answer to our educational struggles with our special needs kids.
We returned home and bounced around ideas about how we could make this move a reality. A month later, we had a very solid plan, which was to start looking for a house in late winter. We wanted to move no later than July, to allow the kids time to get used to their new environment before school starts in August. And so, we’ve started sorting and purging and acclimating to the idea of a new future.
Autumn's Writing 