It’s been an interesting five months. Back in September 2015, after much soul searching, my husband Wayne and I decided to pull up stakes after 22 years and relocate to Abbotsford.
After a few trials and tribulations, the details of which I won’t bore you with, we sold our house. It’s amazing the turnaround in the Coast house marketing in the last two months. Suddenly, after several years of flat sales, the demand is far outstripping the supply of homes for sale. A true good news/bad news scenario if ever there was one.
For people like us who need to downsize, it’s a godsend. For young people looking to buy their first home, not so much. While I sympathize with them, it would be disingenuous to pretend I’m not happy with the way things turned out for us. My advice is to hang in there – your day will come.
The past few days have been a whirlwind of lists, moving boxes and silent tears. Right now everything is at the hurry-up-and-wait stage. We’ve sold the house, bought the condo and now all we need is for the money to change hands. So we stand back and let the legal beagles (thank you, Wendy) do their thing, thank the competent realtors (Pete, Patsy and Fran) for their help and wait for the money masters aka bankers (thank you, Gillian) to do that final step.
The moving boxes are self-explanatory. After selling, selling and more selling and finally giving away of stuff, we’re finally down to an almost manageable amount of stuff (there’s that awful word again) to take with us. At this stage, I’m pretty sure that hell is a place where you pack and unpack boxes for all eternity. And purgatory is an endless round of garage sales. Heaven must be never having to move again. Come to think of it, it probably is the last move some of us will make.
The tears come when I think of all the wonderful people I will no longer see on a daily basis. The list is far too long to divulge here, but includes my Rotary family, my Toastmasters friends and the many, many treasured people I’ve met through Coast Reporter.
For those of you who are happy to see my back end going through the screen door, I hate to disappoint you but you haven’t heard the last of me. Through the generosity of editor John Gleeson, general manager Yvonne Paulson, and publisher Peter Kvarnstrom, I’ll still be sharing my thoughts once every five weeks or so.
To the rest of you I say, this is just adios and not goodbye. Thank you for everything.
