There are moments in life, probably not as often as we'd like, when you realize you are really, truly happy. These moments are fleeting, and sometimes the moment can pass in an hour, or in a day (or hopefully) can last a little longer than that. I had one of those moments on Sunday afternoon, and though it really only lasted a couple of hours, it was a perfect happiness where everything in the world seemed right.
We had given Ella the option of staying another week in Hamden and starting school in Amherst after Labor Day, or going up this week, living with Kim, and starting this week. We were both surprised and delighted when she opted to start school this week, as, for the first time this summer, she has become excited about school again (as would I, after having seen Pelham's playground and meeting the kindergarten teacher).
We decided to pack our bags and head to Amherst on Sunday morning so we could get Ella settled in for school. The plan was for Ella to stay with Kim at a friend's house for the week (no dingy apartment for Ella!), attend school for the week, and then head back to Hamden on Friday afternoon so we could pack up some of the house and have us all move to Amherst on Sunday (of Labor Day weekend). Since Maisie's school doesn't start until the Tuesday after Labor Day, we figured Maisie and I would stay in Hamden for another week while Ella and Kim got started in Amherst.
Our first stop after arriving in Amherst around noon or so was our friends' Meg and Sheila's daughter's birthday party. Meg and Sheila are old friends from New Haven (spanning nearly 10 years back) who relocated to San Francisco shortly after adopting Banti (their daughter) in 2003 (just days before I gave birth to Ella). Sheila just got a faculty position at Amherst this summer, so their entire family (along with little sister, Ruta, who is Ella's age) relocated to Amherst a few weeks ago. This is the first time our girls have met, but given how excited we are to spend time with Meg and Sheila, we figured it was good for our girls to get to know each other.
Here's Ella and Banti together:
Our next stop was our home away from home in Amherst, the Holiday Inn Express. Its actually a great hotel, with a nice pool and hot tub and a free breakfast in the morning, so our girls think they have died and gone to heaven every time we stay there with them. As it turns out, the daughter of the manager of the HI Express is in Ella's kindergarten in Pelham!
While Kim and Ella splashed around with the girls, I got to go out for a nice trail run on my new favorite trail, which traverses the Holyoke Range in Hadley and Amherst. Its a challenging trail, but the payoff is that you climb to the top of a small mountain and are rewarded with a gorgeous view of the valley. To get to the trailhead, you get to drive through some of the most gorgeous farmland I've ever seen (remember, I'm a sucker for farmland, and love the smell of cow manure). This is all in Hadley (bordering Amherst).
After my running adventure and their swimming adventure, we headed to downtown Amherst for dinner. Its a wonderful college town that's got a lot of charm, and its also very kid-friendly, so you never feel funny about being at a restaurant with boisterous children (as mine tend to be). Ella got a hold of my camera and actually took some nice pictures of Kim, Maisie, and me (and that giant margarita in the foreground in Kim's, who needed it desperately after an hour and a half of swimming with the girls while I was frolicking on the trails):
To top the evening off, we decided to take the girls out to a wonderful little working dairy/creamery we discovered in Hadley, called Cook Farm. Its a great place because kids are free to explore the farm and meet the dairy cows, chickens, cats, etc that live on the farm and then eat ice cream from said dairy cows afterwards. I have this ridiculous love of cows (and hence my refusal to eat beef) so I spent most of my time petting a little calf I fell in love with (picture below).
Maisie found her own favorite calf:
And of course we played and ate lots of ice cream:
I love the late afternoon sunset on Ella in this picture:
Mischief, as usual:
Eventually we had to drive back to our home away from home, but we caught an extraordinary afterglow from the sunset on the way.
The magical afternoon finally came to an end, and we tucked ourselves into our HI Express beds. Ella got up and marched off to school this morning with Kim, while Maisie and I headed back to Hamden for our last few days of living at 4 Frazier Road. I did get one nice picture with Ella before her first day in Kindergarten in Pelham:
Kim reports that Ella's first day of school was great. There were a few tears at drop-off, as expected, but Ella came home from school happy and chatting about her new friends (whose names she can't remember, of course). I think all is well up there, though I must admit its hard for me not to be there this week as Ella starts school.
The hard part of moving (the physical stuff) will be this weekend, but hopefully we will be done moving a majority of the essentials by Sunday evening. A UMass moving company is coming later in September (hopefully not too much later) to pack up and move the rest of the house, so we're just renting a UHaul this weekend to get our beds, counches, clothes, cooking stuff, and a few other essentials up there. I think our new rental house will be wonderful, and our landlord (now a professor at Princeton) has been nothing but remarkable and generous in terms of acquainting us with the area.
I have to end by saying that one of the reasons I feel so happy is that already, in our extremely short time there, we have been made to feel more welcome (and we haven't even moved in yet), than we felt the whole 2+years we have lived in our current home. As I mentioned many times earlier, we have been living on a small cul-de-sac the entire time, with neighbors in close proximity, and yet because we are two women living together (I'm guessing) nobody has ever welcomed us or knows anything about us. There is still one neighbor just two doors down that has so much as waved at us, and she's got two daughters our girls' age.
And yet, here we are in a new town, and it feels like people have shown us more generosity and kindness than we've seen here in years. Between the welcoming school community, reuniting with our old friends and already developing solid friendships with new folks, and people just generally being nice when you pass them on the street (strangers say hello!), it feels like some sort of wonderful mecca for nice people. I'm sure the bubble will burst some day and then I'll think we're back to the mean old world, but for now, it feels like heaven.