Closing doors

The alarm drags me from a deep sleep. Within minutes our air mattress is deflated, last minute items stowed in our bags and the car packed. The house of Tim's childhood now stands empty, his parents having been moved into the nursing home last year. The sounds of childhood laughter, old TV programs, running toddler feet and shared meals echo faintly in the empty rooms. The family picture wall is blank and painted with fresh coats of bland paint suitable to market the house, but my mind still sees them there, denying the For Sale sign in the front yard. We know we will never be back inside this house of memories because an offer has been accepted and the new owners will take possession before we return. We take a last sweep through for missed belongings and close the door.

Kintala safely on the hard, we're headed across the country to our old condo to get it ready to put on the market. The renters are moving out next week and we'll begin the process of cleaning and painting in preparation for our own For Sale sign in the yard, hoping with all our might that the real estate agent's assessment of the market is correct and that this time we will successfully divest ourselves of this land anchor.

We've closed a lot of doors in our forty years of marriage. Aviation kept us moving a lot and Kintala is our 17th home in those years. Some of those doors we were happy to close, others left me weeping as I pulled the door shut. All of them brought significant change to our lives, but probably none as much as closing the door to the condo and moving on to the boat. During this brief visit we listened to Tim's sister as she recounted the horror stories of dealing with 55 years of stuff embedded in every nook and cranny of his parent's house. We sat around a restaurant table last evening and listened as my niece-in-law (is there such a thing?) recounted her frustration with corporate society. We dodged distracted drivers in frenetic traffic, surfed hundreds of cable channels to find nothing, strolled through malls filled with useless merchandise. While some doors will always hurt to close (grandkids are the number one reason people quit cruising...), closing the door on our condo, two years after going cruising, is an affirmation of this new life we have chosen. I'll miss the kids terribly, but I'll be ready to head home soon.