What You Leave Behind

It’s not a secret anymore that Jakki and I have taken to the road for an indefinite period of time. Years of planning have finally come to fruition and we’ve left what for years we’ve considered home. We’ve built a new home inside of someone else’s old home and stuffed it full of our things.

The balance of leaving home in your home is strangely comforting in the shuffle of the things we’ve changed about our lives. Our living space is a permanently messy desk, we’re constantly straining to fix the newest problem with something we’d thought we’d fixed years ago, and the only truly permanently dedicate space is a holding area. I am always dirty somehow.

But the list of accomplishments as I look back is staggering: We’ve stripped the innards of our new home and painted it. We’ve removed nearly all of the flooring and replaced or refurbished it. We’ve added our own furniture. We’ve changed all of the fixtures to LED lights to save battery power. We’ve installed a Solar Power solution to reduce our dependence on gasoline for the creature comforts.

And it will be two Solar Power solutions, soon. And we’re adding a local cellular signal booster. I’m determined to boost the power to that damned speaker solution we installed in the bedroom so we can collapse and watch an episode of Parks and Rec without straining to hear the audio from an iPad. I’ll get that bathroom sink drain solved soon, damn it. The list of wants and needs continues on as indefinitely as our trip.

There’s an old adage referring to the foolishness of saving money without an end result. “You can’t take it with you” is a mantra that’s been used to shame the miserly for centuries and now it applies in a completely different manner. There is so much we had to dispose of or sell or give away to fit our previously comfortable lives into a very limited space. Ironically, some things we had to buy as more compact or efficient versions of the things we’d previously enjoyed.

There’s no replacing you, though. You know who you are.

When we were finally planning The Launch of Sunbadges, our noble Mobile Home, we knew it would be important to say goodbye the best way we could. We also knew it would be impossible to keep our schedule if our dearest friends knew our departure was impending, so we planned a very public party with a very deep secret. And we said, “We’ll see you when we see you” to our friends, possibly for the last time ever.

We’re so lucky to have the friends we’ve had all these years. I’ve called Minnesota my “home” for almost a quarter of a century and the place itself hasn’t had much meaning to me, but the people have. I will dearly miss them.

Being able to miss someone is an incredible gift, you see. We were friends because you were special to me, and to have my heart broken because you’re no longer just a phone call and a short drive away means what we’ve had or done together was irreplaceable. Through the lens of retrospect, it’s always easy to wish you’d had more time together but I think it’s better to remember what the times we’ve had. Your life will always be filled with both of those types of friendships. Regardless of which we’ve had, it was magnificent.

Of course it was. You were there.