The house creaks and cracks with such ferociousness, I am unable to sleep. Perhaps it does not like the starkness of bare walls, the absence of furniture, the finality of boxes stacked and sealed. It is my last night here – just myself, a king sized bed and a complaining house.
So much has changed in the five years since we bought this place, on a whim, a response to the fear cancer evoked in us. I didn’t know then that it would be me, not my husband, who would benefit from the healing environment, who would be thankful for the small space, who would take to bed here.
But even an old character like this house can become a prison, and as life threw one curveball after another at us, we decided that we could either stay put and wait for the next one, or we could move on.
So, I spend one more night, while Ric does last minute preparations on the RV, and listen to the grumblings of the house.
“You have been very good to us,” I whisper. “Now you will favour someone else.”
Maybe the house, like me, is afraid of unknowns. She is older than I am so change must certainly be more precarious. She emits another groan, and I concur. We grand dames need more TLC at our ages, but I have faith – an injection of new life will do us both good.
Tomorrow we sign her over to someone else. And tomorrow we embark on an adventure wilder than I’ve ever dreamed.
(Image of sunset over Lake Huron, our temporary new home, is compliments of my husband, Ric Knutson)
Perhaps none of us is meant to be an impenetrable force: the kind of force I aspired to in my youth.
We’ve traded it all for fresh air, early morning bird calls, and ever-changing scenery.
I hear the grunts of men hauling my china cabinet, the living room couch, the multitude of boxes, contents unmarked. How do you define years of accumulation? Silly really to still be holding on. They will go to storage and be swallowed up by the black hole of Thingdom, never to be thought of again.
Tomorrow more strangers will come, set the house up so that it is no longer recognizable as ours. Having loaded the last essential goods into our truck, we’ll pull away, point the nose of the truck forward, and move on.
Dear Parents,
Dear Kids,
Dear Life,
Like turtles, we carry our home with us, and while we may move a little slower than everyone else, we are not catering to anyone’s schedule but our own, so it doesn’t matter. Only two days into our trip we found a lovely spot at a small RV park in Asheville, North Carolina along the French Broad River and ended up staying three nights. When things got too hot in Sarasota, where we were packed in like sardines on steaming concrete, we pulled out a day early and headed elsewhere. The flexibility of this lifestyle is freeing.
