Before Bluebird Cove 6: Saying Goodbye To Alabama

It was really hard to leave "The Refuge." That's what we called our home in the woods in Alabama. It had been a refuge for me and leaving the home where we had seen our son, Benjamin, grow up was hard. He had labored with us in the work of the land and there were sweet and sad memories everywhere.

That became something to hold on to as a reason to leave. A fresh beginning. Ben was doing well in Oklahoma with his job and was in the process of growing up apart from the confines of our home. God would be the one to guide and shape him now. We've watched many families of birds nesting around our home, so we knew there came a time in life for the little ones to fledge because they had become too "big" for the nest. There came a time for them to learn about the world and how to survive in it.

I like change and I'm always ready for a new and exciting project. A move is certainly a project and one that I've done rather well over my lifetime. I moved a lot when I was single wanting to work at various places to get out and see the world. We had a number of corporate moves also, so organizing a move and packing up a home was nothing new to me.

We returned from Virginia ready to go. We decided to make the move ourselves for the savings of it all. We'd done it before and had friends to help so it was a rather fun day of it all getting the trucks loaded, but by evening when Charlie Allred got the two cars secured on the carriers behind our 21' trucks, we were tired and yet excited to get to our destination.

We had two feral cats that we called "ours" and we intended to take them with us to Virginia, so I had put them both in the screened porch for the day so they would be ready to go also. One of them we called Kitty Girl. She was a gift from God to me only a couple of weeks after my favorite cat had died at 20 years old. She looked just like her except for a smudge on her face. What a delight it was to have her. Before we could trap and spay her, she had a litter of three kittens. We found homes for two of them after trapping them, but the third one got away. We always assumed a fox had probably gotten him, but a year later he came to the house to eat with Kitty Girl. We called him Kitty Boy.

There were 13 hours between us and our new home, but we had planned to drive all night to avoid the heavy traffic on the interstates. After all, I wasn't totally comfortable behind that wheel. I had done this before when we moved my parents from PA to OK, but it had been 21 years before. When we had gone to pickup the trucks, the one I drove home didn't have the car trailer secured properly and it slipped up under the truck at the first light. That incident proved to unsettle my mind a bit as we pulled out from Prattville, Alabama, headed for Palmyra, Virginia.