Anticipation

When I put Jordan to bed last night I told him to "get ready in his mind" for how his room would look with nothing in it. No bed, no shelves, no toys, no chess board, no table, no wolf picture, not even any curtains. I said it's going to look funny with nothing in here, but it's all the things we are keeping safe so we can take them with us. Jordan said, "Yes, it's going to be kind of funny, and also it's pretty sad. Because we are leaving our home. And that makes me sad. That's why I cry sometimes in my bed."

I said he was right, it was going to be sad to leave. "And," I said, "also it's going to be exciting: because do you know what they have in Seattle? They have a very tall building and on the top of the building is a round part that looks like a spaceship. And they call it the Space Needle. And you can ride in an elevator all the way up to the top, and look out at the city." He was pretty impressed with that. He asked for more things and we wound up making a long list of cool Seattle stuff: blackberries you can pick yourself, a statue of a troll under a bridge that you can climb on, cousin Harry and cousin Sam and their big dog Webster who now has only one eye, Grandma and her fish, a zoo where the bears have their own stream to swim in, a hill where people fly kites. "Puddles, lots and lots of puddles," I said, which he thought was pretty funny. "Because it rains a lot." Ever since then I have been thinking of things I should have mentioned. How could I forget the mountains?