One of my faithful readers, Alissa from 33 Shades of Green, (you have to check out her site - I love her sewing projects, recipes and photographs) asked if there was a story behind the license plate that is hanging on the wall above my laundry room sink. As a matter of fact there is.
Our family had the most amazing experience living in the state of Virginia for a few years. Being Canadian we were skeptical about living among the Americans. We have lived in Canada both on the west coast and on the prairies but moving to the east and another country was a scary concept. We would be far from family and familiar surroundings. To convince the kids we declared this was our adventure and we would come to Virginia not expecting anything but to just embrace what comes our way. My husband and my kids have rich American ancestry, family that settled the Plymouth colony to an American Revolutionary war hero great (a few times over) grandfather, Colonel Timothy Bigelow. (You can read about him here) We used that to our advantage embracing American and Virginian history, realizing that it was our children's history. This enriched our experience.
We fell in love.
Virginia was a wonderful place to live.
The people were so amazing and welcoming. Our neighbours were our extended family. It was incredibly heartbreaking to move back to the west and Canada. We miss Virginia daily and would move back in a flash. So instead of handing back the license plates to the DMV we kept them. I mounted them into shadow boxes and wrote about it here. One is hanging in my son's room and the other in the laundry room to remind us of our most amazing time livin' down south with y'all.