August 2022 - Move Update
Countdown to September 15 liftoff! We have ten days left in-country before our departure to Panama. We have been focusing on emptying the house and storage.
Yesterday, my sister Kathy helped me to empty kitchen cupboards (intimidating for me!), and we got down to skeleton staffing of dishes required to eat only if we do the dishes between meals. On Friday, two shifts of helpers got the second bedroom closet stripped down to minimalism - a closet with office supplies, wrapping paper in industrial quantities, and sewing and craft supplies. I still have to tackle Christmas Stocking stuff and some office supplies that haven’t been designated a home, but the closet is closer to empty than it has been since I moved in December 1995.
The apartment doesn’t feel much different in general, though I can tell by the emptiness behind closed cupboards and closet doors that we are making progress. When we were kids in Kirkland, we three girls shared a bedroom, and when Dad got tired of our mess, he would empty the closet, the drawers from each of our three dressers, pull everything out from under the beds, and make a giant pile in the middle of the floor. We couldn’t eat dinner until we had cleaned the room up again. THAT is how I feel about the apartment environment right now. To clean a closet or a cupboard, each thing has to come out and go into the middle of the room to get sorted, packaged, labeled, and then moved to a staging area according to its next location.
Yesterday, we celebrated Hector’s birthday (Miguel’s brother-in-law) and stopped at Factoria Mall for a final Love It-sized bowl of ice cream at Stone Cold. While in the Mall, we looked for suitcases at Nordstrom Rack. We need two that will be easily recognized, big enough to hold 50 pounds of fluffy Seattle-summer clothes, and 4-wheeled for rough terrain. Miguel had been talking about being able to have giant snakes as pets in Panama, like pythons, and I was not reacting with the excitement he’d hoped. We agreed that he could have snakey suitcases if he would settle for admiring snakes in the wild rather than fostering them as pets - Miguel can pet the bags any time he wants.
We have made many “last time” or “who knows when again” visits, drives, and dinners. We have reservations to eat at Ray’s Boathouse on September 13 to say goodbye to Shillshole and Golden Gardens (we met when I lived in Ballard, near the Locks for 20 years). We are using up a goodly stash of gift certificates all over town. Whew! I feel overwhelmed by the effort to get out of town without leaving a burden for others to clean up after us, but I am also starting to feel the lightness of walking away on the 15th with only 80 pounds of necessities. A week ago, I was selling my gems to jewelers on Capitol Hill, realizing that I only sold a portion of my holdings, so I will have to do a sale more than once - the anxiety was more significant than the excitement. This week, I have tipped the balance on that scale toward excitement.
Today, Barbara from Come To You Notary Service delivered our apostilled documents, so we have all the paperwork required to apply for residency in Panama upon arrival. We have official sign-off by the FBI, Social Security Administration, King County, and the State of Washington. Barbara brought her grandson on the delivery, and we sent him away with a cool brass rhino statuette from our larger-than-remembered collection of figurines. Happy us, happy child. We are paperly ready to go!
Other than you, our favorite people, what we think we will miss most:
MaryBea will miss:
· Our view of Elliott Bay, across to West Seattle and Alki Beach, and east to the Space Needle
Northwest Native Art
· Good toilet paper – everywhere you might need it
· Therapeutic showers (hot water for many minutes)
· Tulip magnolias, iris, tulip fields, hemlocks, and dogwoods – my favorite Northwest plants
· 2-day shipping
Miguel will miss:
· Fresh, clean Seattle air
· Seattle Shakespeare theatre (we’ve had season tickets since 2002)
· Museums
· Classical music concerts
· Speedy business transactions, often with short or no lines
· Clean, clear, safe water to drink
· Good, well-equipped gyms
· Amazon Prime Video
What are we most looking forward to in Panama? Here is our list now:
MaryBea anticipates:
· Moderate temperatures – between 60 and 80, night to day, year-round
· New plants, flowers, birds, and animals to meet, learn about, and invite to lunch. Papayas in the backyard!
· No stuff. Light and breezy!
· Bright, saturated colors
· Small town, mountain living with coasts 30 miles to the east and west
· What will I do? Anything I damn well please!
Miguel is looking forward to:
· Fresh tropical fruits and vegetables, picked ripe daily
· Spanish as his first language, English as his second, and starting a French club to advance his third language, then working on his Portuguese
· Gym-chat in Spanish
· Books in Spanish where a paperback won’t cost $35 - $40 because Spanish isn’t the first language - they will be paperback cheap because Spanish is the first language in Panama!
· Inexpensive dining out
My idea is to check in with these lists in November, then in six months, and again in one year to see how accurate our guesses were; what we really miss, what we enjoy most, where we now have Seattle rainbows in our eyes, and where we find Panama joys we didn’t anticipate.
Blog: Joseph, in our co-op community, built this blog for me, and I have put in all of the missives I created since we went on our scouting trip to Panama in January, so you can go back and peek. Emails won’t transmit with too many photos, so after I publish the blog to you, I will add a few more pictures so you can check in if you want. If there is someone who wants to read along, you can give them this link and have them sign up, then the blog posts will go to them automatically in the future. Anyone who wants to unsubscribe can let me know, and I will turn off their contact information. If you’d like these posts to go to a different email address, just send me a better one.
Blog link: https://seattletopanama.digitalpress.blog/ghost/#/posts
Thank you for your support of us on this big adventure! I am not sure I will be able to send another email before we leave on September 15, but I will let you know when we arrive in Panama City. We will spend a week in Panama City before heading to David (Dah-veed) by plane and driving the 30 minutes to our AirBnB honeymoon suite in Boquete on September 23. Write to you soon!