Three Years Later

We were walking the dogs down the street this morning when we came around a corner upon a giant moving van blocking the road. A man and his dog is moving into the newly refurbished house just down the road and the sight of him sitting on his front porch with his dog watching the truck reminded me that it was exactly three years ago today that we moved to Wildwood Trail. I thought it would be fun to take a picture from the same place as the one I took on the day we moved in. A few things have changed a lot…some things haven't changed at all….

Not long before we moved, I bought myself a little necklace with a pendant on it that said, Vita mutatur, non tollitur …Life is changed, not taken away. It seemed appropriate  as we embarked upon what seemed an almost unreal adventure. We had talked about moving for so long that our Berkeley neighbors and even our children had come to believe that it would never happen. I think we were just as shocked as they were when it actually did.

We left behind a way of life that evolved over the course of 45 years in the same house…the place where we raised three children, and welcomed six grandchildren. Our daily walk to Peet's coffee, runs in the hills with a succession of dogs, the classes I took at the gym at the Claremont Hotel, the  yoga classes I taught, and a close circle of neighbors and friends became the framework of life.

I miss those old friends…but I have made some wonderful new ones.
I miss Peet's Coffee,  but I have found Flying Goat's Aztek Mocha. I have found new doctors, new classes and a life that has changed but is definitely not taken away.

Today I was buying some candles for the Thanksgiving dinner table and thinking about all the people in the world who are running for their lives, fleeing their homelands with nothing but what they could carry. I am filled with gratitude for what we have, and feel even more certain that the only way we can defeat evil is  to open our hearts for those who are its victims and form a united front against it. We must not allow their lives to be taken away by the incomprehensible  acts perpetrated an evil few.