A New Life

My Papa is third from the left.

I want to say that we are starting a new life, but we are not.  We are uprooting our current life and moving it halfway across the country.  It is not even the first time we have done this; it is just the first time that we ourselves have been the impetus of the whole process.  We are not moving because we have to.  Not because the military is making us.  We are moving because we want to.  Because we have this opportunity and it shall not pass our way again.

After Papa died I spent hours poring over old family photos.  My grandparents moved back and forth across the country several times in the span of their lives; as children, they endured travel during the Great Depression.  I have taken for granted my entire life that people - my people - are able to just get up and move.  It is possible.  We can go somewhere new and do something new.  We don't have to stay here and do the same thing.

From one of Gama and Papa's road trips

Yesterday we walked through the house, room by room, with our realtor and talked about when to rent the house, how much to expect in rent each month, and the fact that we will not be able to break even, etc.  It was a real eye-opener because it turns out, in order to drastically increase the number of potential renters, we need to list the house during the summer instead of the fall.  This means instead of having three relatively packed months ahead of us, we now have less than one.  We now have 21 days.

21 days:

To pack up 70% of our things
To clean the house as it has never been cleaned before
To list it and be prepared to live out of our offices (even more than we currently do, which is saying something)
And then to hopefully rent it and get all of our stuff out before our Africa trip
And then to move to Denver when we get back

Once our realtor left, we collapsed on the floor in silence.  We all but had to breathe out of paper bags.  We had a few serious moments of, do we really want to do this?  Yes.  Then how in the world are we going to make it happen?  This is how... 

We do not know what is on the other side, but we know that we are not happy on this side.  The place we live is awesome in its own way and it has slowly become what it becomes for most people:  very comfortable golden handcuffs.  Eventually you can settle and you can do well for yourself and you can get used to living at a certain standard.  And in order to maintain this, you excuse the traffic, and you dismiss the draining effect, day after day, of a life lived at 100MPH.  And the handcuffs gradually tighten until you simply don't feel them anymore.  Don't see them anymore.  And then you forget that there is another way to live.

From our time in Frisco

It is time for us to move.  It is time for us to breathe mountain air and meet new people and spend our weekends exploring the West.  It is time for Jamba Juice!  It is time for walking to work instead of driving.  It is time to get rid of half (or more) of what we own and to stop accumulating things simply because we have space to fill.  

In order to soften the blow of all the manual labor of the past few days (hello, packing!), we have had the Harry Potter movies on TV tonight as we putter around the house (thank you abc family!).  We just watched the end of the Goblet of Fire, in which He Who Shall Not Be Named becomes a reality in the lives of our beloved characters.  At the end of the movie, Hermoine laments to Harry, "Everything is going to change now.  Isn't it?" He nods gravely and says, "Yes, it is."

Not everything is going to change for us.  Just a few very important things.