My goal tonight is to briefly tell - how did I get here?
Where is here? I'm sitting with my family in the front room of a cute little home in the small city of Livingston, Montana. Watching Downtown Abbey.
When last I strove to keep up and write I was writing from our comfy little home in Puyallup, Washington.
Granted, that was four and a half years ago. August of 2010. And I had no inkling that our dreams were just about to be interrupted and redirected. Though in retrospect, the writing was really on the wall.
Just three months later in mid-November, I received a phone call from Dear Hubby stating that he had been laid off at the civil engineering firm he had worked at for the last two-plus years. WHOA.
He came home and we laughed. Then we grieved. Then we panicked. Then we decided to try to make the most of it. We made secret plans to travel to Utah for Thanksgiving and surprise the Robinson family. That was fun!
We then travelled to Yuma, Arizona to spend Christmas with the Petry grandparents. Can you say warm sun and swimming? We even took the long way home up the West Coast and enjoyed seeing the Redwood forest and Oregon coast.
In the meantime, both hubby and I actively sought work. It was slim pickin's. Hubby had one interview from all the local applications submitted. I had none. Barely even a thanks, but no thanks. Hubby even contemplated going back to school.
That winter was very wet. Quite dreary. We had begun to cast our applications outside our comfort zone, out of state even. And there was hope! I began getting responses from organizations in Utah. The quaint little dream we were building on our cute little piece of property was slowly looking less and less appealing. And it was awfully wet.
By March it was settled. We would put our home up for sale and return to Zion. My brother and his family had graciously invited us to move in with them while we got our feet under us. I interviewed with two organizations and had follow-up interviews scheduled.
We sloshed and mushed out of our home and into a huge cargo truck and took off. We arrived in Farmington, Utah on April 1, 2011.
Dear Hubby continued to apply for work and applied to a low-residency program for creative writing in St. Paul, Minnesota. I followed up on the interviews and nothing happened. Hubby was accepted into the writing program at Hamline University, to start in July.
We decided to take a quick trip over Memorial Day Weekend to Yuma again and surprise of surprises, Mike was called in for an interview! It was for a construction company, based in Colorado, selling a product to engineers. He did get the job. Well, kind of. They thought he "looked rough," and would fit in in Montana. Would we like to go and open a new territory for them? We could live anywhere we wanted...
Here is where the long story gets short. Ha. The owner of the company told hubby that if he were to live anywhere, he would choose Livingston. So we looked it up. We called the local church leadership. We travelled up over the 4th of July weekend. We fell in love.
We packed our belongings into a much smaller truck and said goodbye to many bewildered family and friends, and headed off to Montana on July 30, 2011. We moved into our new place on the 31st and promptly welcomed wondering family within two weeks. They concurred that this was a good place.
Livingston is the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park and a railroad town. It is right off I-90, about 25 miles east of the university town of Bozeman. It is the 12th largest town in the state of Montana with just over 7,000 residents. My favorite way to put it all into perspective is to say that there are now just over 1 million residents in the state of Montana. There are 1.2 million people in Salt Lake County.
I love this place. We all love this place. And we are grateful for the crazy circumstances that brought us here. There are many more in-depth stories in there. And that is how I got here.
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