8 Months Since, 4 Months In, 1 Month Until

I was going to call this post “Transitioning,” but when am I not in the middle of a transition? When is anyone?

Here’s my stake in the ground right now: eight months since I called it quits with the road, four months into the apartment, one month until we move into the house, at least temporarily.

Yeah, we’re moving into the house a little sooner than I’d anticipated. Tracy reasons (as usual) that we have a huge damage deposit down on the apartment, and we can move into the house whenever we want, so we might as well make the move early to leave plenty of time to clean it and get our money back. Works for me, because, rationally or not, I’m exited to be in the house.

Subtract from that deadline the week I’ll be in Virginia visiting my aunt, and we have only a handful of weeks left to pack the apartment and unload into the house. Wasn’t it just the other day we were packing the Airstream and loading it into the apartment?

Or wait, that was five months ago.

Consider, though, that we didn’t own much when we did that move, and since that we’ve been going to estate sales and thrift stores as often as we see them, plus Paul visited and brought me a bunch of stuff from his house, and voila, suddenly we own all this stuff that has to be boxed and moved. Again, right? How does stuff keep appearing like this?

My point with this post is the reflection part, though. There were things I said I didn’t want to forget about living in the trailer, and things I was really looking forward to with living in a sticks and bricks.

How is all that remembering and enjoying panning out, is what I’d like to know. Time to reflect. (Note that the following stuff is what’s easy to talk about. It’s not easy to talk about my grief from leaving that lifestyle, so I’m just not gonna.)

Bummer Stuff

Seeing the sun set and seeing it rise. My god how that grounds you, on the planet, in your day, in your mind. How do people even tell what the heck is going on when you don’t know where to look for the sun? Or the moon? How can you tell how long the day is? What the weather’s like? Anything?

Having everything we own within arm’s reach. Yes, Virginia, you can entirely lose something in a one-bedroom apartment. How it’ll be to lose things in a two-floor house, I am not excited for.

Stairs are quite the thing. Turns out I never used stairs on the road. Yes, there was hiking and the occasional mountain, but staircases? Never. Just that week I spent with Finn at the house was a workout for my knee.

I forgot how to sit criss-cross applesauce. Well, you rarely have a reason to sit on the ground when you’re on the road. Yeah, I would sometimes hike with my book and take a break against a tree to read. But, I’d forgotten that in a house I spend a lot of time on the floor. Another revelation when Finn visited! We were playing board games, and damn I couldn’t sit on the floor without shifting and moving my weight around. Knee surgery hadn’t helped that, but neither did having no floor to sit on in the trailer.

Yoga will help with this, and renewing my daily practice is something I’m grateful for, so it’s a handy transition into:

Joyful Stuff

Laundry! I knew I would enjoy this, but damn. I bet I average five loads of laundry a week in the apartment. You can just throw clothes in the washer any time you want! Any amount of clothes!

While in the passenger seat of the truck the other day I caught a glimpse of someone in a laundry mat, and it took me by surprise. What was that guy doing? Oh yeah, that. Eughck.

At the house, until we renovate (if we renovate), the washer and dryer will be in the basement down a set of perilous old stairs, so I will not be doing laundry so often. But it won’t be in a laundromat, that’s for damn sure.

Cleaning! Yes, I’ve become one of those people who likes to clean. Consider the factors, though.

• My home isn’t constantly collecting dirt by being towed behind the truck.
• My home isn’t so small that all our hair and dust and dog dirt isn’t concentrated inside it.
• My home isn’t so small that I have to use special tools (that I never owned) to get into cracks between cabinets or between sofa and bed or closet or under the dinette or wherever. That Airstream has some tight spaces.

If you can untangle those double negatives, it means our dirt is less concentrated, there’s less of it, and I can reach to clean it. Plus, I have room for a broom and a mop and a vacuum! Cleaning is a joy when it’s possible, is the thing.

Wasteful Stuff

Don’t get me started on the electricity we now waste (I leave the freezer door open and walk away for a sec.), the water we now waste (I leave it running to use the garbage disposal, the garbage disposal!), and I even waste the toilet paper. I swear, residential TP is designed to fall off the roll at the drop of a hat. We go through, seems like, five times as much toilet paper as we used to when we bought the RV stuff.

I have our portable printer just siting out to use whenever I want, and damned if I do use it. My use of resources used to be so deliberate, and now it’s casual. Use use use. What a lifestyle this is. Using stuff.

The most wasteful activity I’ve found myself falling into is using AI for fun. Shame on me. Back when a Walmart came to the town I lived in in West Virginia, my neighbor Victoria and I would call each other when we found ourselves inside the Walmart being tempted to buy crap we didn’t need, and we’d talk the potential shopper off the Walmart ledge. Similarly, I had to text my Airstream friend Amy to talk me off the AI ledge the other day. Good grief.

This is what I did before I pulled myself away.

A distorted mock-up of the kitchen/living room of the house if we renovate. Subtract about a kazillion square feet, though.

A more realistic version of the kitchen, although there will be a bit more countertop room.

To the left of the kitchen will be the backdoor/mudroom area.

The downstairs bathroom with improved paint and curtains and fewer doodads.

The upstairs bathroom with ditto small improvements.

I could have gone on and on with AI. Thank you Amy for texting me,

It was fun while it lasted. And I’ve needed the fun. I spent the morning in urgent care, directed there by my wonderful sleep medicine doctor, seeing as how I’m reacting to the methadone. Not well. Tomorrow I go back to the hospital for my post-op neck appointment, and the next day I’m there for another iron infusion. No sunrises, no sunsets, just masks and charts. But, this transition will take time.