Check this out! We’re doing it!!! I’m so proud of us! As you know, packing up a house to move is not easy! But we plod along, one foot in front of the other ~ and it’s working! Even with breaks to have fun! This is my studio window … from where I’m sitting right now! The view has changed! Scary, or what? Need Musica! 

I SO love old music!!! I hope you do! New music too, but there’s just something especially touching about this old WWII stuff. So what’s new? Basically Joe and I have been flitting around in two worlds. The wonderful world of our friends, and our “normal” springtime Island life, the garden,🪴 walks, books📚, parties, and making lots of wonderful new memories 📸 (because it ain’t over till it’s over, and even then, I promise you, it ain’t over) ~ and the other world, slow-moving, dust-eating🧹, boot-kicking, forced-march, teary-eyed, earth-based, packing🧳, barn-emptying, decision making, deep-cleaning ~ discovering lost things, wonderful things, and remembering💌. Put it all together, and we have Real Life. Something we are learning to rise above!🥳

I probably don’t need to explain much with these pics! I think you get it… This is the packing room. Formerly known as the dining room.

Do this long enough and you begin to look around the house for new creative ways to pack things! We’ve hired a wonderful old friend to help us, and this is totally HER!👏 A true packing genius! First time I realized, that space thing, it’s an art!💞

From the dining room to the living room, she has marked all the boxes, listing everything that’s in the boxes on the boxes, they are numbered and the numbers correspond with a list of everything on paper, plus she photographed them. All bases covered, this should work! 🤞

It’s not pretty! Probably more like making sausage.

But you know what is pretty? All the clean and empty rooms, with clean and empty closets! It’s been one room at a time. Packing up what we’re taking. We took the four poster in this room. We have three, having four-poster beds is based on my childhood books and old movies, and I HAD to take one of them with us. For Louisa May Alcott. For Beatrix Potter. For the memories.💞 Do people even have them anymore?

We took this one. Bought all our four-posters 30 years ago at Leonard’s Beds in Rhode Island.💝 

I’m kind of proud of how pretty the rooms look even with nothing in them! This is the “baby room.” These walls used to have all my oldest family photos on them, my grandparents as children, and our kids (my siblings) as babies.

You’ll recognize this one . . . it’s my Peter Rabbit Room  (click here if you never saw my Peter Rabbit Room💝). You can still feel the coziness in this lovely room tucked under the eves, so much like a tree house (easy to feel it lying in bed, looking at the tops of trees outside the windows) . . . and I left behind two tiny bits of Peter-Rabbit-Room: a cloth purse in the cupboard lined in blue and white check, Peter Rabbit on it, with his cotton-ball tail, and there’s a door hanger as you go in, with Peter Rabbit on it, that I got at Hilltop. But those two things up there ⬆️, they go with us.

Our bedroom, see any tiny ears?

There he is! This is his “rubber-band room” … We play every morning and every night before bed … and whenever he can trap me up there during the day. I stand at the door and shoot rubber bands (thick hair-ties) over the bed to where he is standing on an exercise bench! He catches them… see his eyes? He is waiting!

My studio . . . kind of my last pack-job, not done yet. For any of you involved in this same kind of nightmare ~ all this just proves that if we can do it, you can too!

Yeah, we tried that. Doesn’t work. It’s actually a lot like writing a book, or any big project ~ at first it’s so disorganized it feels overwhelming, but then, you just put one foot in front of the other, and one day progress becomes visible, and you are surprised to say “I’m DOING it!” Deadlines are helpful for me, but we have changed ours 3 times, however…

The kitchen . . . Not done, because we still live here, but getting close! We took everything off the fridge, and now it’s all working its way back on!

The truck got here yesterday and they started loading . . .😳I’m not thinking about it. 

Not even trying to hide this truck! It’s like having Godzilla in your driveway.

Joe and a helper worked until about 10 last night when it was cool and moonlit ~ they got a lot done!

The whole trick in loading a truck is balance. Is what they say. (Carrie in England and I have been texting back and forth ~ she wrote this funny thing: “Is there anything worse than moving? No. Nothing. By the end you’re chucking hammers and screwdrivers in with the China.” 😂🤣 And that’s exactly where we are right now, and exactly what we’re doing. Soon we’ll likely be throwing last-minute loose papers, shoes, tea balls into the back of the truck!)

They finish loading today . . . and supposedly that truck full of stuff will be on the ferry this Saturday! We’ll see. Then we clean up the house, and make it look beautiful. That’s when we officially put it on the market, and in about three weeks, we pack the van … an ice chest full of goodies goes between our seats, Jack’s carrier sits on top of the ice chest, and we fill the van with my original art and other stuff that goes with us! And off to see the wizard we will go!

And in the MEANTIME … the other side of our lives, the beauty side . . . because that’s there more than ever!

We walked over to Lowely’s the other night, walked home under this moon, amazing how pretty pictures of night sky can be with just a regular iPhone.  

Daily I take my scissors and go out to visit Joe’s little wildflower garden, our first, to pick a flower or two, and to see what new thing is coming. We have no idea, we just got a big bag of mixed seed on the internet and threw it out there. First up was poppies! Something coming now I have no name for . . .

XXX

Here it is!

We went out to Menemsha for dinner aboard our friend’s sailboat   . . . to hang out, eat, drink pink wine, and watch the sun go down ~ Jaime brought these gorgeous flowers, we brought potato salad from John’s, the fish market I told you about in the last post … they make it JUST like I do, except they don’t use onion, relish, or celery. But they do the hard part, so we just gussie it up and voila! Tis the season, and if you can’t get to John’s, look here! It’s the best recipe! (From my Summer Book if you have it.)

Be sure to add the mayo to the eggs and potatoes while the potatoes are still hot or warm! It’s the trick to the deliciousness!

So there they were, waiting for us . . . that’s Jaime in the hat with the blue dress. She’s my friend who had TRIPLETS (a total surprise), all boys, and then a year later, ANOTHER boy! No one could have done it better. But, I’m still not over it. I probably would have given up on life that very moment, even before the actual BIRTH!😳 But the boys are wonderful and in their 30s now. Back then I saw an article about Jaime in our local paper … then I saw her for the first time shopping in Edgartown. I knew it was her because she had a stroller for THREE, and those 4 babies were all in there! What a gal! In so many ways. Besides making life for all her friends so much more festive, she’s a famous caterer here on the Island.💖 

There’s George, the Captain of the ship (called appropriately LOL, because that’s what you do when you’re on board), working the bar.

Such a gorgeous night . . .

Before we went to the boat, I saw this set-up on the beach … had to go take a picture … I think it was a wedding shower! What a party! When I first moved here, my sister and I took a table & chairs, champagne, cake, salad, paper cups and plates, tablecloth, and brought my Dad here for his 60th birthday in my little old VW convertible. We bought cooked lobsters at the fish market up the street, and celebrated his birthday right in that same spot on the beach. Swam to get the butter off, and drove home under the trees with James Taylor singing to the stars. Now that’s a memory!

On the boat, same thing, we ate, we drank, we talked, we laughed, we breathed this rarified air and watched the sun go down. More wonderful memories.

The sunset turned Joe pink, and made his hot pink shirt even hotter!

Well, I have a hundred more things to tell you, but this is already long enough and I still have more! For one thing . . .

Remember this? Recognize it? Yup! Downty!

Better known as Highclere Castle (as in Downton Abbey). I did a whole post about this wonderful day… you can read it HERE!  

Well, guess what? Highclere Castle is having a contest that anyone can enter! I got an email from Laura who reads my Willards and is also their media person ~ she told me about the contest and said I should tell you! The winner will receive a three-day, two-night trip for two to Highclere Castle this September complete with airfare, accommodations, ground transportation, a behind-the-scenes tour of the Castle and estate, and tickets to an invitation-only VIP cocktail party hosted by Lord and Lady Caravan! AND she sent us a bottle of the Highclere Castle Gin! It came in a velvet bag, tied with gold cord, and even a little recipe book! It’s good to have friends in high places! Made with botanicals from the estate and from the orangery and with the lavender planted in the 9th century by the Bishop of Winchester. We got it, but we haven’t tasted it yet. Saving it for when that truck goes away! Or tonight, whichever comes first.😁

You can enter the contest HERE. They say if you buy a bottle of Downty gin (I renamed it) they’ll give you 20 chances to win the trip ~ it’s a promotion … but you don’t have to in order to enter, Laura stressed to me that it’s free! Nothing to lose! And it’s all inspired by the coming release of the third Downton Abbey movie! Big-time Red Letter Day!💞

So what else … in my last post, at the bottom, I listed a whole bunch of books and movies to read, listen to, and watch … I need to add Band of Brothers to it, which streams on Netflix . . . as suggested by one of our Girlfriends. We watched the first episode last night, so GOOD. Killer good. Scared to see the next one as we are talking D-Day, but ready to sqwinch my eyes closed just in cases. Just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, so good. We both cried at the end. No wonder so many baby boomers ended up on drugs in the 70s and 80s … everyone had PTSD after the terrible violence of the 60s, I was only in the 11th grade when John Kennedy was killed, it was one after another, John, Martin, and then Bobby … and I have brand new respect for President Johnson. Little tug of my heart for him.💖 Books are such wonderful things.

Something else, if you go to the top of this Willard you will see “Home Cooking” . . . put your cursor there for a drop-down … Take your time, look at “Summer Recipes,” and “How to Cook” … for lots of summer deliciousness and cooking demonstration blog posts. Kellee did a wonderful job putting it together! Happy cooking!

Look Here . . .

We got the Secret Notes back in! They’re hand-made so it takes a while, but so special. . .

This is our first year without shrink wrap on our calendars .. NO plastic. I’m happy! I can’t believe all the tags and plastic and stuffing there is with everything we buy . . . I hope it works well. Be sure to let me know if you have problems. Fingers-crossed it works.💞

So, time to go and start throwing things into the truck! But I had to show you . . .THIS was the very first night in our house way back when. JUST the beginning of 35 years of wonderful friends, food, and FUN! (But I think what I’m hearing here is “We need more beer!”🤣)

Here’s to us Girlfriends! Happy summer! Thanks for all the wonderful sweet comments! Love you! 😘