Today it began.

This is the day I begin the greatest adventure so far in my life.  I declare myself incapable of failure … for in the end, I will be my own hero.

Currently I live in a noisy suburb of Atlanta.  Behind my house an endless stream of cars whiz along the once quiet road, now a short-cut to avoid interstate traffic.  Airplanes landing and taking off at Atlanta airport fly almost directly over the house a dozen times a day.  By now I’m immune to the sound.  Airplanes have been a part of almost half my life in some way or another, but I know they are there.  Like the squirrels that live in the attic, I know they are there, they just don’t annoy me any more.

It’s how things are here.  However ….

There is, three hours north of where I currently live, a quiet piece of mountain side property with a noisy creek that runs along the foot of it.  Rue Anemone grows along the forest floor alongside fiddle head fern.  Herds of deer cross the old logging trail that crosses my land, and high above my head a hawk makes home in the tallest hemlock.

The first time I saw it, it was covered in a half a foot of snow, but it took my breath away.  I knew from the moment I saw it that it was my destiny.  After all, I’d asked God for a sign and God GAVE me one.  Okay, so it was a Berkshire Hathaway “For Sale” sign … but it was a sign none-the-less.  Four months later I owned a piece of Serenity Mountain in Waynesville, NC.

That was the easy part.

The hard part is giving up my life here in Georgia where I have lived my entire life.  Here, I’m close to friends and family … my veterinarian … my doctors … my hair stylist … the hot tamale place … my favorite deli … the places I hike … and everything else I’ve come to depend on.

My father, who in my opinion was the smartest man I ever knew, once told me that if I want to get from point A to point B smoothly, I may want to consider all the space between them.  In that space lies an infinite number of choices all mine “ripe for the making”.

“Pick your way well,” he said.

That’s what I’m about to do.

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MY A to B TO-DO LIST …. starting with “A” ….

• Spend as much time with friends and family as possible
• Purge the house of everything I don’t need/want/haven’t laid eyes on in five years
• Hike at least once a week
• Bake something and deliver it as a “thank you”
• Get the house ready to sell
• Pack and Move
• Build the new house on Serenity Mountain
• Keep up with this blog! Be faithful and write at least once a week!
• Keep my SH** together!!!