Closer...
25 July 2014 | Brisbane Marina
Vandy
Yesterday, Eric remarked that the weather here in the Bay Area is unsettled. That's a lot like our lives right now: we're unsettled, too. We no longer feel at home in our house, and we're still getting settled aboard Scoots. Every night, we sleep aboard Scoots, spend the next morning finding places for some of the items we've brought from our house, then head to our house, to sort the last items into "donate," "keep," or "trash" piles. We'll keep at it until everything is sorted and placed. I hope it's soon. Every time we roll the full dock cart to our boat, I think it's the last load. It's not.
A few days ago, after spending the night on an inflatable mattress in our daughter's former room--the inflatable mattress because we sold our bed a month ago and took our mattresses to the dump last week when the painters came, and our daughter's former room because it was the one containing the least amount of painters' supplies--we came to the realization that our house is no longer our home. For Eric, it doesn't feel like home because every time he looks for a tool or a pencil or some other item, it's either been sold or donated or taken to the boat. Nothing is where it has been for the past twenty years. Nothing is where it should be. For me, our house no longer feels like home because I can no longer feed the birds, squirrels, and other wildlife that I've loved having around for the past two decades. It's time to move on.
So Scoots is our home now, and every day we go to the house that used to be our home, to collect items for donation, or to collect things for a dump run, or to make it nice for the next people who will call it home. Our house is now firmly in the clutches of the real estate machine: The painters will be done tomorrow (Friday), the cleaning crew will come through on Saturday, the new carpet will be installed on Monday, the brokers will traipse through on Tuesday, the stagers will do their magic on Thursday, and the official Open House will be the following weekend.
Then, when some people decide that they would like to make our house their new home, we'll take the next step, cut all our ties with our former home, and focus all our energies onto getting our new home, Scoots--and ourselves--ready for our September departure. Maybe then things will feel more settled.