He’s a creepy little guy, but he had some right ideas…

We watch a lot of Disney movies around here.

A lot.

And so, not only do I have the soundtracks and princess-y whine/giggles and various talking-animal jokes permanently etched in my brain, but I have the Disney Kool-aid commercial that opens each of their DVDs, too – the 30 seconds or so that you can’t skip unless you take a sledge hammer to your Blu-Ray player, which, you know, would anger your husband a tad.

Anyway, the said commercial is a lovely (if you’ve seen it less than 1000 times) montage of Disney movies, both animated and live action, and it begins with the classic creepy-boy-who-never-grew-up, Peter Pan, saying : “here we gooooooooo.” The girls love it. Of course, those same girls at 2 and 3 refer to the Cinderella castle as theirs and make mention of their “Disney home.” Their parents have not only drank the Kool-Aid but passed it ’round.

Since Rod and I were married (almost seven  GLORIOUS – see that, honey? – years ago), we’ve had a general plan, an inkling, that there was this big old open horizon stretched before us, a frontier we would discover together. At first we thought it was just moving some place… warmer. And we thought it would be Lexington, Kentucky, where Rod has relatives close by, in the state where he was born and the one he still considers next to Heaven. We thought we’d wait for Josh and Paige to each graduate high school (a milestone still two years away), and then we’d be off, to a simpler house with more land, shorter winters, greener pastures.

Then Rod started singing again, and I went to Nashville (specifically Hendersonville, where my soul-parents Johnny and June lived) and I fell in love. This is the place! I thought, though with my new baby here (I can’t believe Miranda was ever 5 months old…) that was just an abstract thought. I’ll never move is the one that seemed more likely.

There isn’t a conclusion to that story. In the last three years, we’ve had a lot of starts, some finishes, some road bumps, and, as is the running theme of my life, adventures. I don’t exaggerate when I say that at least once a day I am still perplexed by it: “You talked to WHO?” “We’re going WHERE?” or my personal favorite “We OWN WHAT?” In the past year and a half, we have added a convention in Branson, where we’d never been before, a gospel magazine, a trio to go along with Rod’s solo ministry, and as of today, a recording company to our family ‘suite of products.’ We’re like friggen Microsoft office (with far fewer resources).

I know that move is coming. I know it will be in the Nashville-ish area. And I know it will be before Paige is done with high school, with her blessing and enthusiasm to join us. In fact, when I was putting away our Christmas decorations this year, I packed them with extra ‘packing,’ because I really knew in my soul that we had spent our last Christmas in this house. And since we came back from Nashville a few weeks ago, I’ve been eyeballing all the lovely clutter (our books, my illustrious Buffy & Dr. Quinn DVD collections, the cute little flower-pot fondue-thing we got for our wedding that I still haven’t used but it looks so cute in the corner of our counter) with a hunger, much the way I hunted for salt-and-vinegar potato chips last night (Kettle Cooked, thank you. It took 3 stores and a patient BFF to find them!). I want to start throwing crap in boxes. I want to continue in my 2010 self-imposed mandate to simplify and throw away!

And… I want to go.

It’s impossible to differentiate between a desire to leave a place but utter lack of desire to leave the people there (Mom&Dad, Jen, Jer&Gina, cousins, friends-since-kindergarten, mommy friends, I’m looking at you). It’s impossible to reconcile leaving the very, in-my-blood familiar of Well Group doctors, Aurelio’s pizza, El Cortez, our church, I-80, the inexplicable cow statue still standing on Chicago Road, the ability to see the Sears Tower from here (35 miles away) on a clear day, WGN morning news, the Metra, etc/etc/etc for the new things I have fallen in love with about the Nashville area, for being able to pick out a home for the first time with my husband, for hopefully shorter winters and a more central location for our ministry travels, for Nana Rosa’s.

I’m letting it simmer and blur for now. I’m breaking the news either gently or jokingly, depending on my audience. But my sense of adventure is, perhaps for the first time, meshed with my sense of reality. It’s time to paint and pack and prepare, because here we gooooo.