Yurting All Over

Today I decided that, if I am ever to make the big move to smaller, I'd better do it soon; six more months and it'll be physically impossible. I'll be stuck forever in my too-large house with my too-much stuff, moldering away while entropy has its way with me.

Okay, that was a bit dramatic, but, when I'm this tired, I lose all subtlety and absolutely everything becomes high drama. My eyes are crossing with fatigue.

We finished moving all our stuff out of the little San Diego apartment and cleaned it to death. I scrubbed every tiny imperfection off the walls with one of those magic spongy things. We spackled nail holes, scrubbed the bathroom floor with a brush, and polished the inside of the refrigerator. Our goal is to have the complex inspector say, "Wow, we won't even need to paint this place! It looks better than when our professional cleaners finish with it. We're gonna give you guys back every penny of your deposit and, on top of that, we're paying you what we would have paid the cleaning crew." And now we're beat, whupped, aching.

We unloaded the last carload of crap valuables at my daughter's and stuck around just to marvel. She already had a house full of stuff; she's now in the process of getting rid of her older stuff and switching to our newer stuff, but ALL the stuff is still somewhere on the premises--back yard, garage, front  patio, down the halls. When Giovanni's delivered supper tonight, Daughter had to apologize to the delivery dude for the maze he had to navigate to reach the front door.  Some neighbor is going to sic one of those hoarder reality shows on them.

Our daughter was equally exhausted. She'd spent her day carving one operative room out of the chaos. Her family room looked awesome: big overstuffed avacado sofas, tons of tasteful pillows in acid shades of tomato, eggplant,and lemon; purple lava lamp burping yellow bubbles; wall of eggplant draperies, personal art photography blown up and framed...hippy revival retro-chic gorgeous. In fact, it looked eerily like my recently disassembled apartment, only somehow better. Ah, those marvelous napping couches; we should have invited ourselves for a sleepover.

Proud recipient of the
Marine Corps Food and Hospitality Excellence Award

Instead, we had the brilliant notion to save money by sampling the luxury of the Miramar Inn at Marine Corps Station Miramar. Think 1.5 Star. We were forgetting that we're a little too old and brittle of bone for roughing it. The Inn hasn't been redecorated since 1978,  I'm positive the mattress is original, and the wall art has faded so much, the greens are pale blue now. There's no fitness room, but the Semper Fit center, which serves the whole base, is within walking distance...advertising a special Butts 'n' Guts class every day at six p.m. I'd be willing to bet the whole place smells like an old unwashed gym sock. Which is about how I feel tonight, come to think of it.

We fly home to the East Coast on Wednesday. I'm in no fit state to make big decisions...or, at least, no state for good decisions, but we'll see how it all feels to us after the travel lag wears off.  Maybe we'll downsize or maybe we'll find that we've shot right past our Last Ever Move without knowing to label it as such at the time. That's the way most last things play out, in my experience; later on, I realize, "Oh, that was the last time I ever did so-and-so!" Know what I mean?

Maybe I'll give up living in rectangular rooms full of stuff altogether. I could give it all away to Habitat for Humanity, reconnect with my Flower Child roots, join the Rainbow Family, and live in a yurt that I move from National Park to National Park, following the Gatherings. I think there's even a permanent-ish gypsy camp of Rainbows somewhere in the woods around Asheville. I'd have nothing hard to move and nothing with 90 degree angles to it. I'd sleep in a pile of homemade quilts and forgo fripperies of any sort. Yeah, that's the ticket.

For tonight, words blur on the page and even this rock hard, vintage Marine mattress beckons me. I'll catch up with you in a few days.

Peace and Love, my blog brothers and sisters.

Semper Fi.