Community (or: what we are leaving behind)

How Linden interprets "please don't play with those boxes" (a few minutes later, he turned them into a slide)

As you might imagine, with one week left to go, things have gotten a little hectic and surreal around here.  While Clark and the kids have mostly spent their week with as much normalcy as possible (ie, going to work and school as per usual), my time has been absorbed in the strange world of sorting, culling, planning and packing.  As such, our once functional lives have slowly started to become a little more confused. With each passing day, there is simply less available - less space, fewer means of cooking and clothing ourselves, fewer toys to play with.  This is at once satisfying (boxes full of stuff is such a tangible measure of progress!) and HIGHLY annoying. It is difficult enough to successfully navigate your days as a young family... to live in such a liminal state increases the challenges considerably.

Juniper performing in her fiddle class's final concert

 In all of the physical and mental slogging (and accompanying exhaustion) involved in these final stages of the move (coupled with the excitement and promise of a new chapter in our lives), I have only just now begun to realize how easy it has been to gloss over what will actually be the most difficult part of this whole experience.  To uproot so drastically means, of course, that we must simultaneously leave a large part of ourselves behind.  Even though we knew from the very beginning that this was going to be a temporary move, and even though we were only here for two and half years, we have become incredibly invested in our lives on the Cape.   Of course, Woods Hole is a beautiful corner of the world, but the true reason for our happiness here was that we had the rare privileged of being a part of some pretty amazing communities, filled with truly wonderful people. This is what made our time here such a positive experience, and also what will be so extraordinarily difficult to leave. All of this suddenly became very clear this weekend, as were were given two different farewell parties - one with a group of our very closest Woods Hole families, and the other with Clark's WHOI colleagues.  Here are some photos from those two events:

At Valerie and Dan's:

The "nice" group shot (can you believe we managed to assemble everyone for this?!) ...

... and the requisite crazy one!

Extra big hugs from Tuli

At Fiamma and Rosalba's:

 "kid's only" supper on the deck with Kea

Snuggles with Ben and Liz

A final good-bye to Becca

(the next day): drawing with Sharpies on ben and Liz's kitchen floor

This coming week we will truly be saying our final goodbyes - apart from all the people we were lucky enough to spend this past weekend with, both kids will be leaving their respective schools behind, and I will be saying farewell to the clay studio, and the friends that I found there.  We will be leaving Woods Hole just as the spring sun is bringing light and warmth, and everyone (and everything) is beginning to emerge from a particularly deep winter hibernation.  It is perhaps the most heart-breaking time to leave, but also one that will stamp a lovely image in our memories.  And as I'm already getting teary, I will stop for now.

I will leave you with a little video footage from our very last Woods Hole folk dancing afternoon.  Because it was such a momentous occasion, Clark woke Linden up from his nap early to come join the festivities for the last couple of songs.  It was the first time he'd ever gone, and he LOVED it.  (Juniper was a stellar big sister, and completely took him under her wing).