Three years ago today we closed on our home in Maine, selling our beloved space and all it contained.
We left the dishes we received as wedding gifts a decade earlier stacked neatly in the cabinets. We left the dining room table we built with our own hands (and those of our sweet friend, Emy, who offered not only her hands to the job but also her laughter) one sunny weekend our first summer there. We left the bookcases from Ikea that took hours to assemble and us to the edge of our wits.
The teapot handpainted in the Polish style that I adored and used nearly every snowy afternoon during our long Maine winters. The chest of drawers that had traveled with my Navy family as part of my parents’ bedroom set when I was growing up and I’d refinished during finals week my second year of law school. The canvas print of one of my very first photographs of Maine, a sunrise at the Portland Head Light where any doubts I’d had about our move were swept away with the crashing waves on that rocky slice of coastline…
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Mr. Hussman was my 11th grade history teacher.
His first name was Benedict.
He had very dark hair and very pale skin and glasses that made his eyes look a little buggy.
He'd once been well on his way to becoming a priest when he mysteriously left seminary to teach high school history in the suburb of Chicago I’d recently moved to. I’ll bet there’s a helluva story there, but alas, I was entirely too preoccupied with my 17-year-old melodramas to dig for it. And ol’ Ben was good with boundaries, so I likely wouldn’t have been able to pry it out of him anyway (I was definitely not allowed to call him Ben…as a matter of fact, it still feels super weird even to write it, so "Mr. Hussman" he stays)…
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GUESSSSSS WHAAAAAATTTTT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
WE GOT A NEW DOOOOOOOOOG!!!!!!
Meet Chili Pepper.
Also known as Chili Dog, Chili Boy, Chill Pill (Justin keeps pushing for Chili Bob, but…ummm…no.).
He’s a red heeler rescue from Texas and he just arrived on Friday.
We are in love.
We are all still in the midst of getting to know one another and my full-time job at the moment is holding back the urge to snuggle my face into his neck and squeeze him until the big empty space in my chest that Tessie’s absence left starts to feel full again.
It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, the way we can feel so many things at once? In the midst of my over-the-moon excitement for Chili to be here, there are infinite tiny stabs of grief that Tess isn’t. His arrival is full of so much joy and welcome and love, and it also sort of feels like losing her all over again.
Change is like that, isn’t it?
It shines this big spotlight on all the ways things are different. We stand on this threshold, reluctant to let go of the way things were even while we are eager and excited (if also a little unsure and maybe even a bit nervous) for what’s next…
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A gorgeous spring day is coming to a close as I sit down to write this, and I’m trying to leave the window open as long as I can even though the temperature is dropping as quickly as the sun.
We’ve spent the day replacing the flooring in the new laundry room/ kitchenette in my Dad’s house and it’s nice to see a room actually coming together after a few months of doing the kind of renovation work that’s super important but not very visible (did I tell you that Justin and I replaced all the hot water galvanized plumbing in the entire house? Not glamorous at all, but I’m seriously proud of us for figuring it all out without flooding the house!).
The renovations overall are moving slowly but sometimes that’s the way of true progress: steady incremental improvement toward goals at a rate that is actually sustainable.
We head out tomorrow for a quick trip to see family in New Hampshire and then I have some photography work lined up in New Jersey that will keep me there for a couple of weeks. It’s been more than a year since we were last in New England and it will be really nice to have this time with friends and family. We have a more extended trip there planned for the summer, but this short one is what we can manage this time around and that’s okay too.
So much seems to be in process for us at the moment. Working on my Dad’s home one room at time. Slowly transitioning my business into two distinct(ish) entities. Making decisions about where our next move will be and when and whether that will be a more permanent move or whether we want to resume traveling in Kippee for a little while longer. We’ve adopted a new pup who will arrive here from a rescue in Texas at the end of May, so we’re excitedly preparing to welcome our newest family member while still being struck sideways sometimes by how much we miss Tessie…
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Justin and I were moving slowly south, reluctant to relinquish the quiet of our time in the Arctic. Between the late summer snowstorm spent holed up in our truck in the Brooks Range and several days spent wandering along the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk river laughing over driftwood campfires, we glimpsed only a small handful of people from a distance as they raced one direction or the other along the Dalton Highway.
We relished the solitude. We relished the simplicity of concerning ourselves solely with the basics of life: warmth and weather and nourishment. We fell into the rhythm of the place, listening to the chalky river push around the rocks lining its bottom and watching the shadows move across Sukakpak Mountain’s massive marble peak as the days passed.
The last of August’s summer warmth fled the moment September arrived and we welcomed the signs of fall that greeted us everywhere. The alders and aspens and birches tucked in among the spruce were suddenly all golds and yellows. The blueberry and lingonberry turned deep garnet, the mountainsides and valleys rolling seas of fiery reds. Tessie’s fur thickened in the chill, but even so, we pulled out her down jacket so she could sleep alongside the fire in the sort of comfort to which she’d grown accustomed…
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I was running on the treadmill at the gym last Tuesday (not nearly as good for me as running on a trail, but sometimes done is better than perfect, you know?) and, as sometimes happens on the treadmill, I was really, really, really bored.
The music wasn’t helping. The weird tv screen six inches from my face that kept suddenly turning itself on (reminding me that at some point in the last year I’ve grown to need reading glasses) wasn’t helping. Making up hill workouts and speed workouts that would let me fiddle with the controls every tenth of a mile…you guessed it- not working…
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I can be impatient.
Like, seriously impatient.
Once I decide I want to learn something or accomplish something or build something or renovate something (are you getting the idea yet?), I impatiently want to dive in headfirst and DO IT ALL RIGHT NOW!!!
Which looks like motivation for about five minutes and then quickly turns to overwhelm (cue the “ohmygod there is soooooooooooo much to do here” voice of panic)….
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We were sitting on the bus driving back to school after a swim meet, talking about our futures in the way only 16-year-olds can and I commented that I wanted to be a teacher. Or maybe write novels. Or work in a museum. Or maybe be an archeologist.
My friend, Steve, just looked at me long and hard in the special way that particularly driven young men seem to excel at and finally said, “You do know that you are going to have to pick ONE, right? You can’t do everything, Cindy.”
“Sure, I guess,” I hedged uncomfortably…
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I think I’ve mentioned that part of why Justin and I are in Seattle for the year is to help my Dad do some big renovations on his home here. After doing some quick cosmetic updates on the bedrooms, our first big project is a bathroom gut job. And I mean gut job- we spent nearly 10 hours bashing out drywall and tile and took this baby right down to the studs. It was a blast…
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We drove north, looking for the quiet places in between.
We drove north, sometimes turned back by wildfire, or rockslide, or the suggestion from a roadside stranger of something not to be missed.
We drove north, unfurling that space within us that sometimes gets cramped, sometimes grows small under the pressures of paychecks and laundry and getting the dishes done….
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We lost our Tessie girl on Sunday and we are just heartbroken.
She was about 13 years old (it’s hard to tell for sure with a rescue of unknown origin) and has been slowing significantly over the last year (I mean even slower than she was…she was never what you might call “energetic”), but we thought we had more time than we did and this still feels quite sudden. We are still reeling, honestly…
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Have you ever come back from traveling somewhere and thought, “Was I really just in Bermuda/Nepal/ California/wherever or was it all just a glorious dream?”
It’s a feeling that has become so familiar to us over these last years of travel. Each time we settle into a new place, the last one feels like perhaps it was all just a lovely dream…
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I’m writing this from a cheap hotel room in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. It’s -9 degrees fahrenheit outside, so we’ve been crossing our fingers and hoping for pet-friendly hotels open in mid-winter as we’ve criss-crossed rural Alaska, then the Yukon, and now British Columbia as we make our way south to Seattle, praying that we don’t end up huddled under sleeping bags in the back of the truck (just because you can doesn’t always mean you should)…
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We are closing in on the end of another year and I have found myself thinking more and more about what’s next for us, where we go from here (both figuratively and literally…our time in Alaska ends December 29th!).
We’ve been talking a lot about home lately.
Again. (When you move every three months, this is a topic that comes up often.)
We’ve been asking ourselves if we want to keep traveling as we have been or if we want to begin the process of really figuring out what we want next in our lives. Where we want next in our lives…
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We walked in sub-freezing temperatures across a rocky and snow covered landscape to reach the base of a massive wall of ice. We walked inside that wall and stood in awe of its power, touched the prehistoric stones caught in the ice, looked warily at the cracks in the turquoise ice creating a spiderweb over our heads….
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So often, when we remember the magical moments of our childhoods, those memories are doused in golden summer light. Long days and sunburned noses and the smell of cut grass and hot asphalt and maybe the feel of popsicle melting down our hands. We remember heat shimmering off of cracked sidewalks and drinking tepid water from garden hoses and hair that felt crunchy with salt water.
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When I was in college, I fell in love with the movie Sabrina, first with the 1995 remake starring Julia Ormond and Harrison Ford, and then with the Audrey Hepburn original. I watched them both repeatedly and for a time could quote them with ease…
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