Picture this.
Standing in our half-renovated kitchen. Dishes undone. Dinner beginning to be cooked, late as usual. Isaac arrived home and stood on the other side of the bench. He then dropped what was to become a bombshell. “There’s a mechanic job in the Chathams that they are looking for someone to do”. He then filled in blanks about a workmate filling in there at the moment and so on.
But my mind had stopped. It was focused on one thing…
Could we? Was it possible?
It was only 6 months since my diaphragm was paralysed, and whilst I struggled, I didn’t need more medical care for a year with it. Could we?
Actually, where is it? What temperature is it? What timezone is it? How many people live there? How much does it cost to fly there?
The kids aren’t needing lots of medical care now days… Could we?
I’d have no family there… And how do you order groceries? Could we?
Is there internet there? Is there a house we can stay in? Whilst we don’t need to get ahead financially, will we not go backwards? Could we?
And then I googled.
Filling in a few blanks, dinner not yet cooked. “We could at least look at it?” I blurted out.
And that was the beginning of the end. The end of Christchurch, the beginning of the Chatham Islands. The end of city, the beginning of rural.
As weeks, then months passed, Isaac did a trial run and loved it. We renovated our half-finished house non-stop. I googled my heart out. We emailed and chatted to bosses, family and friends before we looked at each other and said we were doing this. And not 6 months on from the moment he mentioned “Chathams”, we arrived.