God! It feels good to be home!

I have never felt that way about any place before (well, a little, now and then but usually only after a long trip away from my own bed) because most places for me were just impermanent ‘apartments’ or even houses that were not accepted as the ‘ultimate’ long term residence, the real expression of who we were. Our real home had yet to materialize.

But, this loose-goosey-ness is in me mostly, not the places we were.

Sal is a bit different. She adapts and seems to be able to ‘settle in’ and make any place a home using some kind of feminine Feng Shui mysticism that is impossible to grasp conceptually or describe in words.

I swear: I could give Sal an old shipping container and put it in the local dump and within a day it would be so inviting you would want to live there! She is magic. It is truly an art.

Some of the places were very nice. I have always been a bit less than rooted, that’s all. It is in my nature.

Until now, that is. Now, my roots are deep. My roots are on a remote island. Who woulda thunk it?

I attended 13 different schools before I graduated and I skipped a grade! And that is only half of the ‘moves'(if that). That tells you something about my less-than-stable background. When Sal and I got together, we moved to live on sailboats for the next eleven years. Maybe that is not, in itself, overly nomadic but it is definitely not grounded (well, we grounded a few times but that is a whole other blog series: The Naval Years or maybe Lost at Sea).

Sally and I had ten more different homes (not counting marinas and RVs) over the next 40 years together. We must have some Bedouin blood (sounds familiar).

But it is not easy coming home. Logistics, don’t you know?

We have an old Pathfinder, one of the smaller SUVs. We packed it so solidly this trip that, by the time we left the last visited store, Sally had a huge cardboard box of groceries on her lap and a case of frozen dog food at her feet. Her seat had been moved forward so that some of the boxes of books we had for the community could be loaded on the floor behind her. I had tied most of the luggage that shared the backseat with the two dogs to the upper hand-holds by the doors so that they would not roll on to the dogs when I turned corners. Pipes were lashed to the roof. We had four large totes, a large cooler, a 50 pound bag of flour, a 3/4-size SS barrel, a Costco shop jammed in to the crevasses and, of course, our boots, some potted plants, jackets, lunch boxes and all the paper goods (TP, napkins, etc.) we would need for the summer.

We filled the boat when we loaded it at the beach late that afternoon (around 6:00 PM). Thank God the seas were calm! We had been on the road since 9:30 AM and still had two hours of loading and house-starting-up procedures to get through.

We had a dinner of cottage cheese, avocados and a quick-steak at 9:30 and then went back to packing more stuff away. The fridge is full. The freezer is jammed! The cupboards are definitely NOT bare.

Whew!

With a bit of luck we will never have to leave again.