Musings Four Months after Calling It Quits

Usually I try for a theme here with a structure and images that support the content, but I gotta admit that this time I just feel like writing this early morning and don’t know what I’m gonna say until it leaves my fingertips.

I can say that it’s been about five months since the hail storm in Colorado and four months since the insurance inspector lady came to the trailer and inspected it, then told us it was probably totaled. That one month between the damage (that we thought was minimal but weren’t sure) and the declaration of the trailer being totaled (that wasn’t official but did sound like it would be) was nebulous in external forces but decisive for me.

After the hail, when we decided to file a claim, I kept telling myself there was like a 10% chance the trailer would be totaled, in which case our future would open: perhaps the trailer would leave our hands, and we could think abou leaving the road. And then I started pulling hard for that 10%. And then I realized that if that 10% didn’t happen, I would be in a bad place, that that 10% was crucial. I needed to make the change I wanted: I needed to declare our life on the road to be totaled whether the trailer was or not.

Oddly, I told this decision to Tracy in increments about two days before the insurance lady came out. One day I said, “This needs to be our last year on the road. Let’s go to Texas for the winter and then decide what we’re doing.” That declaration did not sit well in my heart. The next day I told him, “I can’t even do winter. I need to get off the road now.”

A couple of days later, the insurance lady came out to us, the next day I picked Madison, and the day after that we drove straight here.

I recount all of this (again) because I still can hardly believe it. We stayed in that campground near Madison for a couple of months, and literally while we moved into this apparent, we toured the house, and then literally while we were hauling the trailer to the auction lot we bought the house.

The timing of these monumental events in my life are important for me to get down on paper.

I’ve had so many instances of weird timing in my life. Like the way I wasn’t in touch with my sister Kim at all when her daughter died, and we’d just started talking again while I was struggling to pay for our mom’s assisted living. Then Kim died, leaving Mom money, I thought, but wasn’t sure. I was frantically selling Kim’s stuff to pay for Mom, and then Mom died. Then, I had two entwined estates to untangle, at which point I basically said, “fuck it,” and Tracy and I sold everything and hit the road.

I think I just said, “Fuck it” again when I was thinking about that 10% chance.

Time is so not linear in so many examples, but it seems like my past has been the poster child of spiraling, back-tracking, circular time. And that’s one reason I write, to flatten out these spirals so I can put my thumb right beside them and give them some perspective.

Here in the apartment, my life is speeding fast forward once again. I’m seeing doctors seemingly every other day: my sleep disorder is getting better with changes in meds, knock on wood; my weird hormones have been diagnosed finally as an odd case of hyperthyroidism (pretty dang rare); and I’m working on the continuously swollen knee. Also, we are meeting two electricians and four general contractors at the house in a hurry to see what can be done when and by whom.

Every time we go to the house to clean and learn about things, like the furnace, we make new discoveries, like the fact that the wind blows through the attic. Tracy comes away feeling increasingly worried we’ve bought a money pit, and I come away increasingly aware that this settling down business is going to take a very long time.

Often when Tracy and I talk with friends here we take an aside to figure out something about our travel days. Where were we when such and such happened? Did we actually stay at such and such place? I’ll pull up my travel map and be freaking amazed we did all of that. “All of that” are the only words I have to describe it.

Tracy doesn’t want to be reminded of what we’ve lost by not traveling. No travel pictures on the walls, no mention of Airstreams. I went through a stage of pouring over my photos and being so proud, and now I’m feeling this regret, not of the decision I made but that that life of constant travel will never be my life again. Apparently, my emotions are just as non-linear as my experience of time.

So, there are my morning musings, written, edited, and illustrated in an hour, best I could do before the day officially began and time continued onward.

Photo up top of me walking from my new dentist’s office (yes, lots of catch-up work to be done there) to the house. Walking!