Goodbye to all this

The house is a mountain of boxes. Three guys spent seven hours today wrapping and packing and taping shut everything we own. Tomorrow it all goes on the truck. We head to New Jersey on Thursday, overnighting with our friends the Hitchcocks in Manalapan before making our way to South Orange to buy the new house on Friday.

All of which is a round-about way of saying I probably won't post again until the weekend. Haven't sorted out Internet access yet, but I should be able to share a story or two from my sister's in Rye, N.Y., where we're spending next weekend before the movers deliver all our boxes on Mon., Aug. 27.

Greta took the unsettling sight of her belongings condensed to six medium-sized boxes fairly well. Her first words as she ran into the playroom: "My books!" We softened the blow and bought two new books for this evening's entertainment: Just Me and My Mom and Just Me and My Dad. Featuring that weird looking monster family, the result of some crazed experiment breeding a Muppet with a Berenstain bear.

It seems fitting to have the final image of our second D.C. chapter be a photo of Greta and Jay, born together on May 5, 2005. Twenty-eight of our 39 months here were defined by their bond, and the friendship it strengthened with my Middlebury classmate Gardner and his wife Allison. When the Associated Press offered me a job, I really did weigh my career vs. Greta's early childhood. By pulling her away from her best friend, do we forever alter who she's going to become? Or, as Allison put it on Sunday, do we actually improve the odds of a lifelong friendship? I believe what she said was: "Now they can fall in love and get married, without the stigma attached to a childhood pal!" In any case, we'll miss you guys.