Long is the journey, rough is the road

I spent the first 18-and-a-half years of my life in one home. Then the week I graduated high school, my parents bought a house and we moved (a whole .7 miles, the trauma!). After that, it seemed I was constantly in a state of flux. I was back and forth around town between the dorms or various apartments and back to my parents' house a few times until I was 23, when I moved in with my Grandma after a bad break-up and urgent move. The plan was that I would be back out on my own pretty quickly, but who can give up living in a house where you have your own sitting room in the basement and cheap rent? Especially when it comes with peace of mind for the family that Gran was getting checked in on regularly.

Well, when you feel the call of the Unknown, you go. And that's how I found myself deciding a couple days before Christmas one year that I was moving to Seattle. In three weeks. I had all the "right reasons" in the world. The Michigan economy was still tanking with no end in sight, I had no kids,  no significant other, no mortgage or lease, and had just recently left my job. I had the offer, if I went in January instead of the following August like I'd planned, of a free place to stay for 6-8 weeks while I job hunted and found an apartment. But none of those reasons were why I left then. In my heart I knew that something else was driving me, something else was pushing me to go, not to wait.

Three months after I left my home of 26 years, the day my lover and partner in crime asked me to be his girlfriend, I knew why it was I'd had to go so soon. Ever since, I've known that whatever comes our way, we're on the right path together. It's a glorious feeling.

Don't worry, the gushing is over, you can put down the vom-bucket. Grab the tissues though.

The sad news is that my partner's dad has cancer, and we are moving away from our home to live with his parents and help them care for themselves, and so my partner can spend more time with his dad before the end is upon us.

We're keeping our spirits high as much as possible, looking on the bright side (pool table in the garage! no stairs for my bad knees to complain about taking!), trying to keep our cool and Just Keep Swimming. I expect a total mental breakdown when the crisis point is over, but in the meantime, it's all GoGoGoGoGo.

It's actually because of this process that I started this blog. Between moving cross-country and now this long-distance impending move, I'm learning a lot (sometimes the hard way) about how to do things. We will also have a lot more House projects to work on in the new place, now that we have a garden available to grow some food and a wonderfully-sized kitchen to work with and make some excellent meals. Not to mention the exciting process of two people with a fully-functional home integrating into someone else's fully-furnished abode. We are looking forward to the projects ahead of us, and hoping that sharing the journey will at worst be a fun diversion and entertaining to look back upon in our golden years. At best, maybe we can help some other folks along the way!

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