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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We have landed, officially.
After a crappy hiccup last week that left us scrambling to find a place to live very last minute (it was a total mess, you guys, but all is well now), we got into a short-term rental on Saturday and Justin began his new contract here on Monday. I think it’s only been in the last 24 hours that I have been able to take a deep breath and look around me, begin to think past the immediate, to get some sense of our life here for the next three months…
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I arrived home late last night from a good long visit with a dear friend on the other side of the country. I like to pause occasionally and recall what a miracle it is that it is possible to wake up in coastal North Carolina and go to bed that same night in coastal California and that this kind of speedy travel across thousands of miles is considered routine at this point in human history. Miracle.
As I woke here in my own bed this morning, Kippee rocking a bit as Tess plodded over to drink water from her bowl, it came home to me that we are closing out our time in California…
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I am writing this morning from under my fluffy comforter, nestled into my bed, Tessie snoring beside me.
We arrived here in Saratoga on Saturday and have been running around doing the 647,000 things big and small required to settle into a new life…
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I’ve been thinking a bit about last week’s post and wondered if you guys might be interested in my “toolkit” on the road, how I hang onto that “creative fodder” until I get settled in our next location and can start sifting through it and molding it into something complete…
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I am writing this days before we depart and life is a flurry as we pack up and grocery shop and do the million and one mundane tasks that must be dealt with before hitting the road.
We’re taking two weeks between locations to head off grid, to simply be together in the quiet with minimal interruption from technology or obligation. We have plans to…
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Well…this is my last dispatch from Tucson. We hit the road on Sunday and begin making our way to northern California.
I’ve said it before, but this is always a bittersweet time for me. When we land in a new place, it always seems like three months is this enormous wealth of time…
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Has it really already been three months???
It has, unbelievably. We are closing out our time here in Tucson and have just signed on the dotted line for our next assignment:
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