My mom turned 70 this year.  I about croaked when I wrote that out in my pregnancy journal the other day.  My husband says she’ll always be 55 to him because that’s how old she was when he met her, and honestly, she doesn’t look any older than she did back then.

When my mom married my dad, she moved to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere that eventually became my beloved hometown.  It was dad’s hometown as well, but not my mom’s.  Mom’s hometown was about 40 miles away from there.

This weekend, she moved back home.

My dad died 3 years ago after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.  My mom stayed in the same little cottage behind the same nursing home my father died in for those 3 years.  She more than exceeded the 1 year time frame most “experts” suggest as being the amount of time you should wait before doing anything drastic after the death of a loved one.

She’s leaving a church and friends and the cemetery where my father and daughter are buried, but she’s heading closer to us and closer to my grandparents.  As I’ve said many times in my grieving posts…it’s not moving on, it’s moving forward.