Day 1: Letting Go

A cat, a dog, an overloaded Jeep, and a stuffed Hyundai. The caravan was in order, the apartment was empty, the day had finally come.

Waking up on a the floor, in a room with nothing but a rug, “Well that’s all folks,” I stated out loud to myself.

Courtney lay face down, recovering from the prior nights celebration, grunting, knowing that in the next 2 hours we would be on the road heading for the first stop of the journey. A few minutes went by and the argument about the amount of junk we had packed started for the 45th time. The Jeep was nearly bottoming out, the dog had no where to sit, and everything I wanted to throw away ended up behind my drivers seat. Knowing that I had lost the war, Court smiled as she piled on the the leftover junk I was hoping to leave behind, her love of recycling was starting to feel more like hoarding.
The last few days of living in Rhode Island, was wasted milling through 3 years of collected items, most of which had absolutely no use, but all seemed to bring back memories of new beginnings on that little farm. From the pictures of the old resident goats to the scraps of wire fencing  used to patch holes around the property, I will never forget the opportunity I was given (and later got to share with Courtney) by my Landlord Veronica and her family. Her patience with late rent payments and my dog digging up her beautiful yard was enough for me to love living there, but it didn’t stop there. She made me dinner when the times were tough, watched our animals, ok’d the construction of a tree-house bed, and allowed us to put in a 200sq ft vegetable garden smack dab in the middle of the pasture, Veronica was all about sharing what she had with us.

Letting go of what is a perfect set up never feels like a good Idea, but even she would admit, you can’t settle until you’ve seen it all. We will return back someday, who knows when, but hopefully we return with less than what we hauled 6 hours South to the first stop in PA this afternoon. Until then, we will carry with us the fact that we will always have another family in Rhode Island.