Life, Triple Spaced

Now

Before

People keep asking me what life is like since the move and how the transition is going. It's difficult to figure out how to respond, except to say that I feel as though my life has become triple-spaced.

In Massachusetts, everything felt tightly packed. I was packing two jobs into one seven day week, all of our things were packed into a tiny apartment, our car tightly packed into its space. It was like a single spaced page where everything fit together, barely. But "Out West," it feels as though all of the sudden, everything is triple spaced. I only have one job--an easier one in some ways--to fill my weeks. We have gone from three rooms to eight: meaning our things and ourselves are spread out a bit more thinly in our home.* And even the drivers here like to "leave plenty of space."** It seems I have more time, more room, more, well, space.

And just as adjusting to new spacing while reading takes time***, I think adjusting to much more space in living takes time as well. Not bad, just different.

One thing that is going really well though is being close to come people that I haven't lived near for a really long time.....including my family! On Saturday, Mr. L and I had our first shot at babysitting our 3 year old nephew**** I'm happy to say that all went quite smoothly (I don't know if I was imagining a trip to the ER or something for our first go-round, but was surprised all went so well!). We did 4 puzzles, discussed various varieties of dinosaurs, reviewed the alphabet up to M and watched half of Charlotte's Web***** and then went to sleep with only a few tears about mommy and daddy not being there. A pretty amazingly cool experience for a triple-spaced life!
 





*Mr. L keeps getting very frustrated that I try to talk to him while he is at the other end of the house: an non-existent problem in our last place (there was no other end) but a serious one here (he can't hear anything I'm saying).
**For a hilarious and terrifyingly accurate reflection on Oregon drivers, see here. If you think this is an exagerration, you've never been to Oregon.
*** A colleague of mine once accidentally double instead of triple spaced his sermon (he was used to triple...old man!), and totally bombed it because he couldn't get the timing of the page turning right. Yikes!
**** I know, I know...we're terrible aunts and uncles for not babysitting him before this, but we lived 3,000 miles away!
***** Does anyone else worry Charlotte's Web is a little bit traumatic for youngsters? I mean the whole problem is that Wilbur is about to get slaughtered for Bacon!???! Just sayin'..... It's like how my Dad always said Pinocchio should be R-rated because they send bad children to an island, turn them into donkeys and make them perform slave labor. Also not great meta-messages for our young folk, I think. But what do I know? Nephew didn't seem at all troubled by these realities.