Last thoughts...

So. Our Fargo adventure is over. I accepted the clerking job from Judge Magill on September 30, 2005, and started this blog ten days later.

Between then and now, Fargo went from mysterious northern locale to the object of much research to home. It is, finally, where we spent a year. We had left so much of our stuff behind in Rockville that even before we unloaded the moving van, our Rockville house immediately seemed full and familiar and home. Now, two weeks later, at odd moments, it's almost as if we never left. Well, except for all these damn boxes I still have to unpack.

Looking around the house, the town, and the metro area, we realize a year really isn't that long a time – except for Rockville's nifty downtown, which had been years in the planning but was finished while we were away, everything is largely the same as when we left. We had lived in this house nine years before heading to Fargo, and could have ticked off a tenth here quite comfortably.

But instead we picked up our lives and our stuff and moved it all north for the year. We saw and did and ate all sorts of things we had not seen or done or eaten before. We made great new friends. We became more resilient people. I look forward to seeing how that resilience expresses itself as the five of us face new challenges.

Thank you to those who made this all possible: those who hired, encouraged, and moved us; those who welcomed us and took us in; those who kept us connected to life back in Maryland; those who taught us about the law, North Dakota, and making deer sausage; and those who helped us return. Our year in Fargo will always be a very important year for our family to have lived.

And with that, I close the book of "Fargoing." It was always designed to be a "deployment blog," and our deployment is over. I hope you enjoyed reading about our adventures; thank you for doing so.