We sold
our garden center in Annapolis and that pretty well made finding
someplace to go imperative. It took a while. We looked in Maryland,
Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, and finally found just the
right spot near Strasburg, Virginia. A nice old house on 25 acres with a
beautiful view. Farms and cows and mountains and valleys and streams all
around. You can walk to the Shenandoah River! And everything’s real
pretty out here.
And so,
like the Clampetts in reverse, we moved from the big city to the
country. We packed up all our plants, plus three households, five dogs
and a cat. We put everything into the biggest Penske we could rent and
moved it all to the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. Actually, we built
shelves in that big ol' truck and packed it from top to bottom seventeen
times.
Ok, so
then it rained. Remember the rain? If you live in the East, you might
remember that it rained a bit this year. In our area, it rained more
than any other year in the history of the universe. It rained for 41
days and 41 nights, breaking the old record. And then on the 42nd day it
didn’t rain. On the 42nd day, it was so hot and humid that I almost
died. And so I prayed for more rain. And my prayers were answered. We
moved plants in the rain, we moved furniture in the rain, we moved five
dogs and a terrified cat in the rain. Seventeen truckloads, plus
uncounted trips in the pickup, van and cars.
So we
finally got everything here, but we didn’t know where anything was.
When you're unloading a truck in the rain you really don't care about
keeping everything in alphabetical order. "Stick 'em over there" is the
closest we got to organization, and towards the end, everybody knew
better than to ask "Where should I put these?" And so all the plants
got stuck out in a big field and it took us until November to bring some
sort of order to our inventory. We still don’t know where everything
is, but most of the plants have been located and we think we’re ready
for spring.
I'm sure
that some day we're going to look back on this and laugh. I'm fairly
sure it's going to be worth all the hassle when its all done. It sure
is pretty out here.
So here's the story of
the big move in four parts:
First we
had to find a place to move to. We started looking in the summer of
2002, and in December, we happened on a little place near Strasburg,
Virginia.
