Yep, it’s been almost a year since our last move. I am assuming by now that most of our friends and relatives have taken to marking our address in their address books in pencil instead of pen — if they are even still bothering to keep track at all! In just under ten years, we have moved ten times, and this last time we pretty much had to settle at the last minute for the house we are now living in because we just couldn’t find anything closer in to Asheville that would take the pets. Right from the beginning it was off to a rocky start; with the nasty bathtub surprise, the rusty water, and the Canton paper mill smell. Add to that the weird paranormal stuff and the horrific expense of filling the propane tank and it will probably come as no surprise that right from the first month we got here, we were counting down ‘how many months left until we can move out.’

But as we got down to these last few months, we decided that maybe the best thing to do might be to tough it out; moving is so expensive, and we’re just flat out sick of doing it year after year after year. We had contacted our previous landlord a couple of months ago to see if she was going to have anything coming up, and figured that would be the only way we would consider another move, since we trusted her and knew that the animals would not be an issue. When we didn’t hear back from her, we went ahead and put in a couple of gardens, fenced in an area for the cats, and settled in.

So…. last week we got our lease renewal in the mail, with an envelope to send it back in after we signed it… and then the very next day, our old landlord called about a house she’d just purchased that would be in our price range.

Well. This certainly threw things back in an uproar, didn’t it? We went to see the house with her and it had a lot going for it; it was on nearly two acres, in a quiet rural area with no nearby neighbors, it had an area already fenced, an outbuilding, and even a chicken coop. There was more space than we have here and the landlord would be pulling out the carpet and refinishing the wood floors underneath. One of the really cool things was that it was a five minute walk to the bank of the French Broad river. The fact that the paper mill smell at our current house was so intense this past weekend that it set off an asthma episode for me sure added to the appeal. Over the following day or so, we carefully weighed all the pros and cons of whether to jump on this opportunity (which had just miraculously sprang up for us at the last minute!) and came to a decision…

Our signed lease renewal went into the mail this morning.

Yes, that’s right: we are actually staying in one place for more than a year. This must come as a terrible shock. ;-) When we signed the lease renewal Joy commented as she looked over the document, “we haven’t had one that looked like this, before.” and I replied, “I think that’s because we’ve never actually renewed a lease before!”

We’re finally starting to dig ourselves out of the hole that ten years of catastrophes, vet bills, and moving helped us create, and we just can’t justify setting everything back again. If we keep making progress, the next move may be into our own house, which is what we really want. And for all it’s annoyances, this house has it’s positive points as well, and it has been a very peaceful place for us to be. With the economy so uncertain, the ongoing drought, and the unknown future the upcoming election represents, we really aren’t sure what we will be doing long-term, but for at least another year, this is ‘home.’