Migration Complete?

Yesterday morning I walked out of my home office to grab a quick cup of coffee in the kitchen. When I returned, I was surprised to find two huge birds standing on my driveway staring through my window. Figuring the number of photographs I've taken roughly equals the number of blog posts I've written since moving to Florida, I decided to grab my camera.

After doing a little bit of research, I was stunned to learn that what I figured was some sort of stork or heron was actually a sand hill crane. My experience with the sand hill crane is limited but still likely more than most. I grew up lucky enough to drive to Colorado to go skiing each year. When you drive to the Rocky Mountains from Moline, IL you follow Interstate 80 across Iowa and most of Nebraska. When you drive I-80 during February or March, you're often lucky enough to see thousands of these grand birds migrating.

While the cranes that appeared in my yard aren't those same cranes (apparently, there are only like 5000 of the Floridian sub-species left and from what I can tell they stay in Florida), I decided that one of two things had happened: (1) they appeared as a symbol of my migration south having come to a close and that it was time to stop using lack of time as an excuse for not writing about my repatriation (I mean seriously, we closed on the new house nearly a month ago) or (2) they simply had no better place to be at that time on Monday morning.

So there you have it, I'm going to attempt to do what very few have seemed able to do which is maintain a repatriation themed blog. Maybe "repats" find that others just aren't as interested in the life they come back to than the life they seemingly escaped in the first place. Maybe it's not exotic. If you don't believe me, Google "repatriation blog" (even without the quotes, the pickings are slim; the only currently maintained blog I could find anywhere near the front page was "I Was an Expat Wife"). I could be wrong, but it seems like there's more to repatriating than just hearing that "it's harder to adjust back to your original culture than it was to your adopted culture."

On the bright side, I've got this whole new Florida adventure thing working for me. Well, that and I'm really just writing this to entertain myself and maybe half dozen other people and to, you know, try and improve as a writer.