Family

The Vanity of Foresight

I’ve taken the liberty of modernizing these lines from Robert Burns’ famous poem:

But little Mouse, you are not alone,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes of mice and men

Often go awry.

“To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough”.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_a_Mouse

We are moving (again). To Kansas City this time. It’s a bittersweet time, filled with promises for the future and sadness for the home and family we will leave behind. We had planned to stay on our Iowa acreage as our “forever home.”

Where the sidewalk ends

We had planned to host gatherings of family and friends around our kitchen table.

We had planned to watch our children play with cousins and run free through the fields.

We had planned to settle in to a slower pace of life.


We have done all those things, but we didn’t expect them to be changing so soon. We expected to continue doing them through the years, rooted in our community and framed by the farmhouse that we lovingly renovated. But, as the poem says, the best laid schemes…


Of course, we will still get to come back and visit, where we’ll attend gatherings of family and friends, it will just be around someone else’s table. The kids will still get to play with their cousins and run free through the fields, it just won’t be as often. And the pace of life is what we make it, not where we are.

It is important to remember that the happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything, they just make the most of everything that comes along the way.

There will be a lot to look forward to with this move. Chris will be able to spend more time at home with his wife and kids. We have found our new home and a new plot of land. We have met some wonderful people. We will be closer to my family, but not so far away that Chris’s family can’t come down for a long weekend (or vice versa). The winters will be a little shorter and we will have all the amenities that a big city can offer.

Onwards we go!