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.We go by our house from time to time, picking up things and dropping off others. Mostly in the extra garage that is not attached to the house, but sometimes inside as well. We make arrangements with our tenants to let us in. We’ve left quite a lot of our things inside, hastily packed in the middle of the last couple of long, sleepless nights before we took off. They ask us sometimes if it seems weird to be let into our own house. In reality, it doesn’t. Or, rather, not in the way you might think.
I feel a strong detachment to our house and our things. We have bins and boxes stacked, holding the accumulation of stuff we didn’t purge before leaving. When I look at them, I not only have no desire to go through them, but I also push back, in the way that two negative ends of a magnet will repel each other. I am not ready to be back, my heart is still pulling me to explore and the trappings of home represent an end to our wandering.
As we took care of Rocky through the last few weeks of his life, and were the hub of activity, the center of the flurry that followed his death, we had little time to enjoy it. Now that things are settling down a bit and we have days where we are the only people here, it is feeling more like another stop along our way. Another house to set up house in, temporarily, until we move on.
The girls have opted to continue with their online school, rather than re-enroll at their regular schools and pull out again when we leave. Although they do enjoy seeing their friends and Marlie has been spending most of her spare moments at the barn or out on her horse, they are also ready to go again. They are excited to go someplace entirely new, and not ready to completely immerse themselves in the comfort of their lives at home.
We’ve been taking the opportunity to re-tool and replace some things. We are likely done with winter, as the season will be spent in summer below the equator. The kid’s heavy parkas are being left in favor of a rain shell and a light sweater type of jacket to layer. Originally, we’d searched for and took along city shoes that we felt could also be used for some hiking. Not a good idea… we ended up with not enough support on the trail and city shoes that were all scuffed up from rocks. So, really, it’s three shoes: hiking, city, and sandals or crocs. This visit home gives us an opportunity to start fresh in some of those things which were not working.
This re-thinking does mean more stops by our house, not just more shopping. Yet, as we pull in and open the doors to find our belongings, I feel estranged from them. I open only the boxes and crates I must to find the shoes or software I need. I tiptoe past them, as though they might wake from a slumber and enslave us in the way possessions do.
