With a mouthful of mashed potatoes, I got the news. I was moving to Canada for three whole years. You see, my dad is a construction manager for Kellogg Brown & Root, which takes him on work projects all over the world. So over dinner he told us all about the trip. What a great opportunity and honor it was to be asked and that they wanted the whole family to go.
Everyone took the news differently. My mom just seemed to sit there in deep though, I suspected she already knew because she wasn’t as shocked as I thought she would be. I was asking a million questions per minute. Things like, “Where are we going to live?” and, “Can we build an igloo?” My sister, being a drama queen, dropped her fork and started crying. It was actually more of a howl than anything.
There were so many thoughts going through my head that I think my brain completely shutdown for a good ten minutes. My biggest issue was friends. Would it be easy to make new ones? Would it be hard to stay in touch with my old ones? Then I had to deal with my family. I was really close to all of them my whole life and now I had to leave all of them to go to this foreign land.
It took longer than you would have expected to pack. We took everything, and I mean everything. The stack of boxes kept growing and growing. We ended up taking things I didn’t know we had. Since my father told us it was going to as cold as an icebox, we packed plenty of warm clothes in easy to reach places. When we finally had everything packed into the biggest moving truck I had ever seen in my life, we were set.
My dad drove the moving truck on the four-day journey and my mom, sister, and I took a plane. I was about seven at the time and it was my first time in an airport. The smell of coffee was in the air and the voices from the flight desks buzzed over intercoms into the halls. My whole body was filled with nervousness and excitement. Finally, after two hours of lobby waiting, we were off.
While we were on the plane,...