A trip through dark places, a sky of strange stars − 10 June, 2008

Here's the story of what happened during our move. I'm going to tell it in several parts over the next few days. They will be in chronological order, so, someday, I might be able to come back and make sense out of it.

Monday, June 9, was my last day as a teacher at Bronson. It's always a strange thing, those long empty teacher workdays -- for what is a school without its students? Maybe its a bit like looking at a corpse . . . familiar features, but the life gone from within.

On June 10, my wife and I loaded up the car and drove nearly 800 miles. We were driving from our old home in Gainesville, FL, to an uncertain destination -- a search for a new home in northern Virginia.

It had been odd, packing for all these weeks, but having no place to go. However, that's the complication in being a school teacher: I can't just take days off whenever I want to, even to look for a new home. I had to wait until the school year was over.

Some people might not like the idea of a 13 hour drive. I don't mind. What I hate is flying. Not so much the planes, but the poor planning, mismanagement, and paranoia.

We made the trip seem a bit faster using a book on tape: Harlan Coben's "Hold Tight." Also, since we were driving, we took the opportunity to load up the car with a lot of our artwork -- framed paintings we didn't want to get clobbered during the move. Hannah's brother lived in the DC area, and we'd be storing them at his house until our eventual move up.

Kind of a leap of faith, eh? Taking up that first load from our house . . . when we didn't even have a place to stay, yet. At this point, we had no idea what the future held. We had no idea what to expect, no idea what sort of place we would find, and no idea if we could even make it through all the enormous changes that were to come.

So the evening of June 10th found me driving in a strange land, on an unfamiliar road. The sun was setting as we got off I-95, and a fleet of thunderheads was cruising across the skies of northern Virginia, headed toward DC.

The lightning came in bright flashes and streaks, but the sky also held stars. I didn't recognize them. We'd traveled about 10 degrees North along the Earth's surface, so the few guide stars I could see made no sense. I thought, at that moment, it was like I'd accidentally traveled to a parallel Earth.

Posted on July 8, 2008. and has been viewed 84 times.