Keeping it Simple

In two days we leave New Hampshire for the coast of Maine, my favorite place in the world.

M arrived from Abu Dhabi. He and our eldest son, who is 17, then drove from New Hampshire to Washington D.C., where M had meetings. They looked at several colleges on the way down, our son checked out three more in D.C., and they're visiting two schools on the return trip. They arrive back in NH tomorrow evening.

The rest of us left the cabin by the lake last week. The morning we departed I saw 25 geese on my neighbor's lawn.

Now we are "camping out" in our own house in New Hampshire, taking advantage of a gap between renters. We don't have a stick of furniture, except a long oak table in the kitchen.
We are sleeping in sleeping bags, some of us using a towel or a blanket if we don't have a pillow.

I love the simplicity: I have one style cup for water, juice, milk, beer, wine and coffee. Every room in the house is spacious, clean, orderly with nothing in it. Our meals are usually one-dish affairs; Robby, 14, asked me last night why it's so much harder to clean up from dinner in Abu Dhabi.

The priority these days is on seeing loved ones. I haven't seen everyone I wanted to, but I've tried to make sure each of the kids has seen at least one friend.

When we move back to NH in July 2008, after a second year in Abu Dhabi, I wish I could refuse to take back all the belongings we've put in storage. I wish we could exist as we do now, with no curtains or "things" to slow us down from seeing the sunlight and the trees outside.