Change
Most of my life I thought I would wind up coming back to Texas. Wasn’t sure it would be alive or dead, but somehow and often under my breath, I figured I’d be back. Well, I made it back, but I think it is funny how the concept in your mind varies from reality, as they usually don’t see eye to eye. I expected Texas to have made the same progress that I’ve seen elsewhere in the country. There are things that will take adjusting to and some things we will just have to accept will never change and not worry about the differences and how that makes us feel. It might be the bottom-line on whether we stay here or not. But again, I think Jen has already said at least once that this is going to be our forever home. With that, we may have made some roots and if momma is happy, we are all happy.
We certainly were committed to the remaining time my parents would be alive and now that Mom passed, I thought we might try to convince Dad to move with us somewhere. I think the outlook of getting to watch Ethan, Ronan, and any of the girl granddaughters in sports, he might be willing to move. Especially, if he becomes debt free in the process. For now, we are looking forward to our new house and seeing where this adventure and jumping off the cliff guides us. Reality, as I’m sure Jen sensed way before I did, is that Dad has no intention to move and is set to stay in his house for the duration.
We are committed to giving it a fair chance over time with hopes that our toleration grows instead of diminishing with time. The one good thing is that we can pack up and get away anytime things start to overwhelm us and we need a break from family, friends, government, or any number of other things. Dad will check on the house, the bird will travel as we have found out she does very well, and we got a small dog and we all fit in the truck and trailer. Outside of family normalities and abnormalities, Jen is building very strong bonds with a circle of friends unlike what she has had in the past. That is in no way a knock on our friends in Colorado, quite the contrary we miss them a lot, but more is friends that Jen can actively do things with on numerous days of the week with a common goal, that mainly being Lucy Jane. Lucy is a dog if you didn’t know already.
From the start, my dread was the final piece of this puzzle in a move was me being the mover and somehow dealing with the logistics of getting our stuff down to Texas. The thing I kept telling Jen is that we can take our time and move the stuff we need to, rearrange the storage so that we can lose the two smaller units and then get the rest of the stuff next March, which now has now moved to June a year and half later and now down to using a quarter of a huge rental. We have two basic things left in storage now, the game room and stuff that can be donated. Both of which will be taken care of in June and we will officially be removed from Colorado. Not storage, no I will still have to get a small unit down here, but the end is in sight and it feels good. We still are realizing we have a bunch of junk cluttering our lives and we have more work to do to totally simplify our lives.
We have completed a huge amount of work on the house, in fact we are at the crossroads of sell or spend more and handcuff us from leaving. More and more we lean to the second idea. We just got back from hiring a landscape architect to help with design. I know that sounds silly, but I get where Jen is coming from. In Colorado, we had about 1500 sq ft of backyard and to make it beautiful was certainly easier. Here, we have near slightly less than an acre of complete manicured landscaping. We are hiring an architect to build a new garage, close in our current garage, install a pool, create a covered pavilion, and connect the two houses with an atrium and meditation room. We aren’t even done at that point, no we have stairs next door, flooring in both houses, painting, bathroom remodels, dormers on both ends of the guest house and I’m sure by the time we near those projects being completed, we’ll have a completely new list.
We are building spec homes for a couple of lots we own and who knows what investment opportunity will come after those. Again, we are planting roots in the community and trying to find a place in it where we feel it’s home and we belong.
Times are changing and under our breath there is that hope that we will grow to call it home, spend lots of time visiting the kids, and spend time with my dad getting to know him better and appreciating our time with him. In the process, also travel the world as much as this country and finally settle into a routine life in rural Texas.