Dearest Loved Ones,
We all start out these letters every year with that inevitable glance backwards over shoulders that have carried the burdens of the past 365 days, and we all wonder where that time went, now so much water under the bridge of memory. For us, the year has had a peculiar heft to it, and as we draw to the close of 2010, our shoulders still feel the gravity of some of those amazing memories.
We have gained and lost so much this year--March saw us birthing our sixth beautiful baby into the world, completing the circle of our family in a dramatic way, while June and September stole from us a beloved great-great-grandmother and great-grandfather. Autumn gave us the gift of a cherished new closeness to a brother and sister-in-law, while October marked the beginning of the grandest and riskiest adventure of our family's small history, when we moved out of our rented home in a search for the ultimate irony: the open road and a permanent home, all at the same time. Two months, two national borders, scores of national parks and landmarks, and seven states later, we're inching ever closer to that elusive dream of home, thoroughly worn by the excitement of all the fantastic places we've visited since we last left our door jamb in the last week of October. The next few days, crammed in just before the last day of this momentous year, should see us crossing a whole new door jamb, our 5 acres in the forest where we will, Lord willing, hang our hearts and our hats, and the hats of our children and our children's children and beyond.
This new place represents so much for our family; it is an old house where we can get our elbows greasy with remodeling and renovating; we will bring home our very first family dog, and we will have room for the boys to grow into the spectacular young men they are already becoming. It's a place for Bonnie's artistic skills to blossom, for us all to get our fingernails dirty and grow something, to maybe bring to fruition (literally and figuratively) our dream of having a sustainable mini-agriculture of our own, a not-so-urban homestead community to share with friends and family. It's a place to re-learn the precious skill of spreading our wings after so long being confined to small spaces not our own, a place to begin to repay all the oceans of hospitality that have been visited upon us by those dearest to us during our time of wandering. It's a place of roots. It's a place to finally come home to.
There has been a song running like a soundtrack in my mind for the past couple of months, since this journey started, really. It sums up so tidily all that we've experienced and what it means for our family, and I have played it many, many times during the dark parts of our journey when we've been reminded that adventures by necessity require peril, and disappointment, and sometimes failure thrown in with the excitement and awe and amazement. It's a song by Rob Thomas called Little Wonders, and the chorus still raises a lump in my throat: "Our lives are made in these small hours; these little wonders--these twists and turns of fate. Time falls away, but these small hours, these small hours still remain." There's another Rob Thomas song that always facetiously comes back to memory at those moments, too..."I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell, I know, right now you can't tell..." But maybe the most potent song of all running through the soundtrack of our family's conscious this past year is that ever-blowing spirit-wind that always brings change in ways we can never fully foresee and rarely understand. And while our shoulders have creaked under the weight of transformation from time to time, our feet have also gotten caught up in that irresistible dance, and we have felt lighter than ever in the middle of our great heaviness. I guess we've found our ultimate irony in more ways than one.
We want to thank each of you who have extended yourselves to care for our family in the middle of the crazy--you have fed us, or sheltered us, or given us encouragement, or been a friend to us, and we deeply love you and are so, so grateful. There is no way, really, that we can repay the love and grace we've been extended, so we try to content ourselves on the wise words of the apostle Paul, who penned, "Pay your debts as they come due. However, one debt you can never finish paying is the debt of love that you owe each other."
And we owe you big-time. Merry Christmas!
--The Bozeman Family
Christopher, Teri, Bonnie, Ben, Isaac, Gabriel, Elisha, & Asa.
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