Woo-hoo! It’s our 34th wedding anniversary today. We will have a delayed celebration next weekend. Kathy said she didn’t have time to get me a card, so we’ll do all that later. We will be closing on her parents’ house on Tuesday, so we are spending our anniversary weekend getting the house ready.

Various relatives and hangers on were all there on Saturday to move the last of the furniture out. My brother in law rented a big truck and we needed all the space. He made stops at Shane’s apartment, our house and his house, delivering a couch, a refrigerator, a high-boy, a buffet chest, a queen size bed and a stove. We all got several pieces. We still put a couch and two recliners in the garage until garbage day on Tuesday. We laid a big old wooden extension ladder, scaffolding and ladder jacks on the tree lawn and within an hour it was gone. Someone really made out.

We did all this in a driving rainstorm, a prelude to a winter storm that promises anywhere from five to twelve inches over the next day or so. Another typical day of anniversary weather for us. I had just drained the snowblower and hung it on the garage wall to wait for another season. It’s now all gassed up the weekend. We should have known better. We remember our wedding day-- it was freezing cold and snow flurries, even in late April. Even the pink dogwood that we call our anniversary tree hardly ever blooms on our big day, but this year the warm temperatures coaxed it out early, but now it’s about to freeze its little bippy off. (Remember ‘bippies’? They typically freeze off, or are worked off, as I recall.)

Our house is now crowded with more chairs and chests and rockers than we know what to do with. Some things we can use in a garage sale, but some we are incorporating into our eclectic décor.

There were some tears as the final bits of the daughters' old lives were carried out the front door, but we have lots of mementoes. The house has been sold to a young family with two little girls. The realtor stopped over today so we could sign another paper, and he remarked that the new owners described the place as their 'dream house'. What a nice way to close this whole experience, knowing that we are helping to launch yet another family from a house that knew so much love. May they too enjoy all the blessings we had and still more besides as they raise their family in that loving setting.