Two objections

1. We have landed in an area saturated with preschool options. Every half mile there's a Montessori this or church preschool that, and there are plenty of people around ready with recommendations for their favorite.

But does no family in this area include two working parents? Of 12-15 options recommended to me and that I've been able to find myself, exactly one offers childcare through 5pm. The vast majority are morning-only programs, sometimes with an "extended day option" until 2:30 or 3. Who gets off work at 2:30?

I can throw out glib comments about nannies and ultra-rich bankers but seriously, doesn't any couple around here, or single parent, work for less than it takes to hire a nanny/babysitter on top of a pricey preschool? I don't understand. Even my employers, who ought to know how long their own schoolday lasts, are recommending what turn out to be morning-only programs for Alice. "They're all good," one person told me after giving me a list of half a dozen. "The only question, really, is what feels best to Alice."

Well, no. The only question, really, is what works for Alice's parents.

Who are these people? (And why is this such a different market than Princeton?)

***

2. Edith is in the middle of her first-ever game of Monopoly. Things were going fine until she found out she couldn't build houses or hotels on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

She objected: Railroad owners do build hotels along their lines.

She knows. She lives in one such hotel. Built, in fact, by the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Right to left

Alice likes numbers. She likes counting and adding, and she likes asking me what number is made by multiple digits in a row. She is interested in the idea that read left to right, a series of digits signify one number, but if read right to left, they signify a different number.

She is applying the concept more widely.

Thanks to Alice we had a backseat viewing of The Lion King almost every day of our cross-country drive. It's her favorite movie right now. Today she found a picture-book version of the movie at her grandparents' house. She looked at it for awhile, then came and told us she wants to be Simba.

It's true she has been pretending to be a lion cub quite a bit recently, with a convincing roar. But...

"Really?" I asked. "Lion King is such a sad story."

"Oh," said Alice happily, "but I read the story backwards. So Simba's daddy comes back to life, and it's a great story."

Walker's paradise

I've posted several times in the last couple of years about my warring love of the Front Range's natural splendor and antipathy for Colorado Springs' urban sprawl. Last winter I mentioned the walkability ranking website I'd found. Today I entered our new address into the site and found we've traded a "Car-Dependent" locale for a "Walker's Paradise."

But we hardly needed the website to tell us that. In Week 1 at our new home we've

• Bought one of those urban personal shopping carts and walked to the grocery store twice to stock up
• Walked to a fancy dinner and sold-out movie for our 10th anniversary (it wasn't climbing a 14-er, as we'd originally planned for our celebration,  but it was a decent substitute mid-move to a more ordinary landscape)
• Walked to the hardware store to buy extension cords and other romantic, anniversary-worthy items
• Walked to Starbucks multiple times
• Walked to ice cream after dinner
• Walked to a free evening concert in the park
• Walked to the train station for schedules to downtown Philadelphia
• Walked to the post office
• Walked to get a haircut
• Walked around a beautiful college campus at dusk, letting the kids play under the trees and in the meditation labyrinth
• Walked to a new church
• Walked past the hospital
• Walked to the farmers' market in the rain and walked home with a cart full of fresh produce, honey, coffee, bread, soup, and flowers
• Anticipated walking to the brand-new public library as soon as it opens in a few weeks
• And of course, walked to the playgrounds and top-notch athletic facilities on the campus where we're living and where we effectively have a personal gym available to us free of charge.

It's all pretty fantastic.

Of course, the miles we are no longer putting on the car in daily life look like they're going to be added to Tom's newly long commute. We've been here one week and Tom has had four job interviews with two different institutions and received two job offers. Both are good churches, both are long commutes, neither job is in his main areas of ministerial interest but both have potential, and a hard decision is in the offing. But two job offers in Week 1! Hooray.

The roads have also brought us an extraordinary number of family visitors in our first week. Last Wednesday Tom's aunts, cousin, and baby cousin showed up when we were at our most chaotic, having let Alice "unpack" toys at will all over the apartment. The family whisked the girls away to play on playgrounds while Tom and I unpacked our way. The next day Tom's parents arrived and took the girls off to see their Bucks County cousins. On Saturday my parents drove in and spent two days with us, continuing to delight the younger set with patient attention and the older set with quality catch-up time. "Who is coming to see us next?" Alice wanted to know.

We've put in serious unpacking time, and the apartment is looking decent. My first major project was to paint the girls' room, which took several days and mushroomed into a far more ambitious project as we added just one...then two...then three accent colors to our initial plan to cover up the electric yellow-green on two of their walls with something more sleep-inducing. The building is an old 19th-century hotel with complex molding, external electrical wiring running along the walls, high ceilings, and other inducements to elaborate painting schemes. But most of their room is done now, and we even have about half of our pictures and wall hangings up.

As we downsize from 2220-square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and 2 offsite offices lined with bookshelves to 1200 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, and no offsite offices, Tom meanwhile has been lugging all kinds of books and furniture up to our attic storage space in the building's tower, right at the top. Think the owlery in Harry Potter; then imagine relocating your library there, sans elevator.

Given the perversity of moving, however, we find we still need to buy some new things for our place. We've done some browsing for a couch and next will turn to floor lamps for dim rooms and area rugs for the old, creaky, worn floorboards. We've gone from wall-to-wall carpeting in even our kitchen and bathroom to hardwood and linoleum everywhere, with people below us to hear every toy the girls drop.

Meanwhile we've toured school options for Edith, gotten internet and TV service set up, gotten to know some of my new colleagues, and spent a day visiting Princeton...specifically, the wonderful public library, the super independent bookstore, and the dear friends at the girls' preschool.

At least one of you has asked what exactly we're doing with this move back East. I spent five unfruitful years on an oversaturated college job market, in which some 20-50% of PhDs from top history programs are getting offers of employment. Then this spring I received an unexpected slap in the face (financially speaking) from Colorado College, which seemed to think I'd jump at the chance to stay on for a 60% paycut and termination of benefits, as casualized labor. Since I couldn't see raising the girls on the street, I declined the offer and for the first time turned away from the higher ed market. Having discovered how much I love teaching (not a proclivity generally admired or rewarded in higher ed), I started looking for jobs with independent secondary schools to see what might happen...and wound up choosing between multiple wonderful offers. After eight years of training and five years on a job market that gives you nothing except the message that that you're unworthy, it's nice to be wanted.

So we actually had--gasp--some choice about where we would move next, and I accepted a job in Philadelphia teaching history at an independent PK-12 girls' school where the girls in my sample class at the interview blew me away.  Another attraction of the Philly area was family relatively nearby, and a final crucial consideration was that Tom had professional contacts and networks in the broader area from our time in New Jersey...as evidenced  by the outcome of his week of job hunting.

So that's where we are. Edith may attend the school where I'm teaching, and as we turn to Alice's schooling, it looks like she might attend the preschool that rents space on campus. In that case the girls and I would live, work, go to school, and have daycare all in the same building. How's that for green living?

Of course, there are less rosy aspects of the area and this turn of events. For one thing, we've traded the land of pickup trucks and Subarus for the land of BMWs and Lexuses. The tuition information for the school where I'll be teaching includes hypothetical family financial scenarios so far removed from what I'd consider reality that it makes me feel a bit ill.

But those posts are to come. One step at a time. To the grocery store, to start.

The way their minds work now

We made it East, driving ten days to arrive in Pennsylvania. Have already enjoyed Wegman's, Dunkin' Donuts, trees, greenery, and catching fireflies. Monday morning we got out of the car at our new building after staying the night with friends in the area, and Edith sniffed deeply of the humidity and vegetation and dirt, then wrapped her arms around herself and exclaimed, "Feel the East Coast!"

Our new apartment is on the fifth floor, and most of the windows are shaded by two huge old trees. Every time Edith goes to the bathroom, we lose her to half an hour of sitting on the toilet staring out at the leaves.

For my part, I confess I'd throw up a 14,000-foot peak in the background, but trees are admittedly pretty nice, too.

 ***

Edith calls to me from bed. I go in to see what's wrong.

"I just wanted you," she says in a cozy, sleepy voice.

"It's nice to be wanted," I say.

"Unless it's wanted 'dead or alive,'" she observes.

Well, yes. There's that.

***

I've been meaning to write more about Alice for some time, especially her love of music and dance. That will come. Meanwhile, here are some of the ways she has inserted herself in the conversation in the last 24 hours (when not simply shouting down the rest of us). 

At dinner last night Edith was talking about the grandfather clock downstairs in our building; she'd been there when it was just fixed after not working for some time. I tell her that my grandfather used to have a grandfather clock that I loved.

"Your Grandpa Uncle Bobby," piped up Alice.

Yes, I agree, surprised. My grandfather was Grandpa Bobby. And the uncle we just saw on our cross-country trip was Uncle Bob, the same name. Then I tell her that when Uncle Bob first married into the family, everyone called him "Bob Kent" all the time, to distinguish him from Grandpa Bob.

"Kent, like at First United Methodist Church in Codoralo," said Alice.

It took me a moment. Huh? Then "Yes!", I said, again surprised. Kent, like the first name of the senior pastor at our church in Colorado.

The kid never forgets anyone she's met...or heard about, apparently.

***

We were scrambling to find Edith a towel after her first shower in the new apartment. I grabbed an old faded striped one. That towel is 18 years old, I told her. 

"How do you know?" she asked.

Because I got those towels to go off to college, I told her, 18 years ago.

"Oh. How old were you when you went to college?" she wanted to know.

Eighteen, I said. So I got those towels half my life ago. Because 18 and 18 are 36.

"How much is half of 7?" she wanted to know.

Three-and-a-half, I told her. Like Alice's age.

Edith paused, then frowned. "But then 7 would be just like 8!" she protested.

I shook my head. Half of 8 is 4, I corrected. Two 4s are 8.

Alice stepped between us and held up her hands, showing four fingers on each hand, both thumbs tucked in. "See?" she said.

***

I said the word "riddle" in conversation, and Alice said she'd ask me a riddle.

"What's green and hangs off a telephone wire?" she asked.

I thought and made some guesses, all incorrect. I told her I gave up.

"A lion," she said.

Oh, I said. I thought it was something green.

"Yes," she said. "A green lion. A green lion that's hanging off a telephone wire."

Aha.

Thoughts on leaving the Rocky/Smoky Mountains

We've left Colorado, smoke in the rear view mirror. The President kindly came to town to wish us goodbye. 

If there's some relief at escape, there's also an incredible sense of loss. We may never live anywhere as beautiful again. I will probably never practice my profession again. Tom has to start once more to look for a job. We've left behind the friendliest neighborhood we've ever been part of. It gets harder every time.

In our last week in Colorado Springs I had the same conversation over and over with people: If all their stuff burned, they secretly might be relieved to be rid of it. There is an article or a sermon to be written on that fact--that Americans feel so burdened by their physical belongings that their catastrophic loss might be seen as an escape hatch. 

Another friend noted that being evacuated allowed her family to spend a whole day together for the first time she could remember...dining, swimming, playing games. This friend recently has been desperate to carve out more family time, even seeking professional help on the problem of having too many obligations and too little time. Again, there's something to be said about the fact that it takes a gargantuan natural disaster to stop the hamster wheel and legitimate some downtime in our society.

Numerous people asked what they could do for us. I thank you all for your good thoughts for us and the region. Answer: Do everything you can to support initiatives to curb climate change and support serious sustainable living practices.

***

When driving away from most places, you get some time to exit the region psychologically,  moving gradually further from the familiar terrain. Not so the Front Range: The minute you start driving east, the mountains are behind you, and within half an hour you're in an entirely different, flat, ranching world, making you wonder if it was all a dream.