Simplicity, Found?
November 5, 2012
So much time has gone by since I last wrote here that I really don’t know where to start. So I guess I’ll start over.
I named this blog “Ontheroadtosimplicity,” thinking that one day I might actually find it. Simplicity, I mean. Little did I know how hard it would be to reach the end of this journey.
So, I came back to the beginning about a month ago when we were walking home from the river, watching our three dogs waddling up the street, listening to persistent birds singing their persistent songs, feeling the muggy air on our skin and looking up at the ever-changing sky. These sights and sounds and feelings caught my attention and made my mind stop wandering. “This is simplicity,” I said to myself. “right here on this road with this air and these trees and this lack of mental madness.” I knew then that my understanding of simplicity had been challenged.
Can you see the simplicity here?
How about here?
Simplicity is in the small moments of everyday life. The ones we barely notice unless we make the effort to pay attention. Simplicity is the sea grass blowing in the soft wind. It’s in the deep, honey sweet southern accent of a neighbor telling his family stories. And it’s in the vast ocean of purple morning glories choking out the already dead corn stalks that surround the finger of land we have settled on. Those are the simple things.
Simplicity?
What is simplicity? Where do we find it? Can we hold onto it?
Simplicity will be the theme of this blog for a while. It’s time for me to complete this journey
But first, a few details…
Ten days ago we flew out to California, rented a Penske truck, drove up to the Northwest corner of the state and started packing what I thought would be our last truck. It took three days to pack. It didn’t all fit so we left the rest there.
The truck is full to the brim, everything solidly tied down and braced against the walls. Nothing has moved. The guys did a good job, at least on the second try. Kevin and Tim have been our psuedo sons over the last couple of years. They are brothers who have a sort of symmetry between them. One is a great organizer; the other is just a serious worker. They balance each other out and get the job done. Here they are:
Kevin and Tim
The first attempt at packing the truck was a miserable failure. All four of us, me, Sam, Kevin and Tim, were operating on half empty fuel tanks. About two hours into the process we stood back, looked at the truck and said, “”This is not working.”
scattered mess. need to start over.
“Well, I’m not so sure about this, guys…”
So we all agreed that it was time to take a break and start over again the next day. It’s kind of like painting or gardening. You have to know when to say, “That’s enough,” and just let it be for a while till you get your mojo back. A good night’s sleep was all we needed.
The next day things went better. Tim and Kevin somehow reconnected their brains in the middle of the night and by Saturday afternoon the truck looked like this:
much better.
Well, the truck was looking good. However, there was still all the rest of that stuff. I’m over the humiliation of needing two trucks to move our stuff across the country, but, at this point it was looking like we might need a third one. Please.
“Will we ever be done with this?”
I can see that simplicity is not going to come easily.
Spreading out
A “Big Ol Box,” according to the owner
This is the house we will be renting for the next year. At this moment it is filled with boxes and disheveled furniture, waiting for us to return from our second UHaul trip with even more stuff. I’m guessing it will take us at least a month to settle in. I am looking forward to decorating the inside and gardening on the outside. I am also looking forward to having a sacred space for yoga. Sometimes more space is good.
Woman in lawn chair on the Rappahannock River
This river is a half mile from our house. We plan to walk the dogs down there every morning until the weather prevents it.
misty morning on the river
seagrass against a blue sky
I can’t get enough of these scenes. It’s not the ocean but it’s the next best thing. My heart and soul have planted themselves here. I am ready for the next step…starting over, moving closer to simplicity.
Catching up…again
We are halfway through the second “UHaul” trip. This time we are using a Penske truck, but “UHaul” just sounds better somehow. Anyway, the last week and a half has been filled with so much activity that it has been impossible for me to keep up with my own thoughts, much less write them down. I will try here to summarize the most recent part of this journey.
Since “arriving” on the east coast we have spent a lot of time exploring–mostly with eyes toward continuing the RV life. We looked at every campground we found, compared notes and settled on a few of our favorites in our chosen location of The Chesapeake Bay. I have lots of photos. Here are a few:
Thousand Trails, Chesapeake Bay
Morning on the Piankatank River
North Bayshore Campground, Sandbridge, VA
Cherrystone Campground, The James River
Neptune, the god of Virginia Beach
I could go on but the point is that each campground had its features and its downfalls. Nice views were coupled with broken showers. Large RV sites were sometimes just not level. One campground felt like Disneyland for adults. Weekends were just too crowded. We needed quiet and tranquility to ponder the next steps on our journey. It soon became apparant that most of these parks would be closing in November. We would have nowhere to go for the winter. So we stopped looking at campgrounds and started looking at houses.
We found a house, parked the RV in the yard and began the transition from a small, 400 square foot motorhome to a 1500 square foot house. But that is the next post.
My Great Grandmother’s house
Today we went to lunch at my great grandmother’s house. This house is very special to our family. My great grandfather built it with his own hands in 1928, and then the two of them continued to raise their children there. Here are a couple photos that hang on the wall inside what is now a seafood restaurant.
This is how I remember the house.
my great grandparents, their five children and my uncle in 1935
I am still learning the history of this house and of my great grandparents. What I know is that they lived in this house for many years. Then my great grandmother sold it one day and moved into a much smaller house across the street. My mother and aunt were with us today and they both had a few memories of various activities here. I have only one vague memory of a family crab feast outside in the yard. I have been told that they raised vegetables and chickens and owned most of the land on what is now a full block. What I also remember is the front porch. It felt grand and magical for some reason. Now it is a room for feeding customers who come to eat crabs.
This is what the house looks like now. The porch is bricked in and it has obviously been painted blue. Inside, the bricks are still original, along with a beautiful stairway and hardwood floors.
Notice the original stairway in the background.
Back side of the house where people get to go orders and where the stairway to the basement hides behind a secret door….
Even though I don’t have many personal memories of this house, I know it is part of my family. It felt strange to be there with so many other people and with so few of my family members. It also felt strange to look at it and see the porch closed in and the bricks painted blue. But I’ll get over that soon enough. The woman who waited on us said the house is “haunted,” and that she has seen a woman standing on the stairs many times. The owner told us he just bought a new boat and didn’t realize that the boat was named Addie until after he bought it. Addie was my great grandmother’s name. He said he is satisfied that she is happy with what he is doing with her house.
In the off season I will go back and just sit there and remember what I can about this very powerful part of my mother’s family. And maybe if I am lucky I will see Great Grandma Addie standing on the stairs nodding her approval.
What I did instead of writing today
OK. I didn’t catch up with my blogging today. But I did do something productive, and then, something delightfully relaxing.
Sam and I agreed that the RV is getting a bit tight for us, especially when we both want to work on our computers. There is only so much space on our little table, and we do both fit, but with no room to spare. Plus, there is the fact that all day long we hear jets flying over us. I knew this was possible since we are right down the road from a major military training base. But I had forgotten how irritating it can be when you just want some peace and quiet. So, we went to the library.
Well now. Aren’t libraries supposed to be quiet places where people can read books and concentrate on important stuff like looking for jobs and houses? Something has changed. The library is no longer sacred space. It has become a gathering place where parents bring their children to learn how to read and sing songs and socialize.
As soon as we hooked our computers up and got to work we heard this sweet little kindergarten teacher’s voice singing at the top of her lungs. “Peanut, Peanut Butter! Jelly! Peanut, Peanut Butter! Jelly!” Then twenty five preschoolers mimicked her. Over and over again. They were in the “meeting room” with the door open, right next to the “study cubicles.” Huh?
We tried to ignore the singing like we had tried to ignore the jets. It worked for about 30 minutes, then a baby started to scream while its mother was trying to tell her six-year-old that she could only check out five books. By that time the preschoolers were roaming around behind us looking for books and chattering away. Sam and I looked at each other and said, “Let’s get out of here!”
We had actually gotten some work done in the middle of all that noise, so we decided to “treat” ourselves by going to the beach. Not the regular, touristy beach that everyone goes to, but the special far away beach that is not cluttered with high-rise hotels and ticky-tacky souvenir shops. People who have lived here a while know that Sandbridge is the place to go if you want to have the beach “to yourself” so to speak. We went to the far end of Sandbridge. There were other people, but everyone had plenty of space and no one seemed like they minded if we had our three dogs with us.
So, we walked a little, and threw the ball a little, and sat a little and talked to people who wanted to know about our dogs. Mostly I took pictures and followed whichever dog was wandering off toward the horizon.
Here are a few of the pictures I took today when I was supposed to be working on my blog.
Perfect cloud over a perfect ocean
Buster digging a hole
Belle and her ball under the lifeguard chair
Sand crab tracks
Small gentle wave, perfect for soothing frayed nerves
Here is my favorite picture though.
Sunset from South Sandbridge Beach
Bring on the jets and the happy little singing preschoolers. I’ve had my beach fix for the day!
In process….
I said I would take a couple weeks and process. Well, it’s been more than a couple of weeks, and I am still processing. The thing is that every day we are seeing more and more and adding to the pile of stuff to integrate. Since arriving we haven’t stopped exploring–campgrounds, big towns, small towns, beaches, rivers, healthclubs, dog parks, grocery stores, and more roads and highways than I can even begin to name or number. It’s all quite a bit to absorb.
So, I am committing myself to sit down and just do it tomorrow. I’m not sure what I will discover in this process of processing, but I know I have something to say about standing on the far edge of one process and preparing to leap onto the near edge of another.
To quote my friend Karen, “This moment is pregnant with potential.”
What about those five senses?
Written July 8, 2012
When I started this blog in March I said I would record what my five senses gave me to record. Mostly, for this part of the story, I have written about what I have seen, but now and then a smell or a sound was the focus. The smell of thousands of cows crowded into a small maze of fences mixed with the smell of society garlic in the California Central Valley was one of my nose’s strongest memories.
I also smelled a camellia in Fayetteville, NC just the other day, which reminded me of my grandmother who tended her camellias like they were her children for at least 30 years. And then, finally, when we settled in SC, I smelled the ocean. I knew I was almost “there” when I smelled the ocean. It is subtle and you have to search for it when there is no wind, but the ocean has a smell that gets into your nostrils and stays there for a lifetime if you let it.
The sounds of birds and cicadas and frogs have served as a background for the changing dialects and accents across the middle parts of this country. I was surprised and in awe of the brave little birds that lived in the few trees in the various deserts. They seemed to own the place and made their presence known to all in the mornings and evenings. I never saw these birds, just heard them. And I remember one night in Alabama when I was walking the dogs and I heard a drone that was familiar but slightly disturbing. It was like a symphony of competing insects making that sound that grasshoppers and frogs make when they are looking for a mate. My ears couldn’t even begin to count the number of different tones coming from the trees and ditches. Since that night, the noise has never ceased.
I can only recall one or two memorable tastes—a fruit and veggie drink that I made with spinach and strawberries and apples and carrots, and the taste of my first real, fruit stand peach. Unbelievably sweet and juicy, even with the fuzzy skin still on. We ate out a lot and quite a bit of it was very good, but there is simply nothing quite like a homemade meal from fresh ingredients. That is something I look forward to in the near future.
And my sense of touch, well what stands out is the feeling I had last week when I finally put my feet into the Atlantic Ocean. The beach was quiet. There was no wind. It was extremely hot. The waves came in gently, as if they weren’t sure how much farther they could go without flattening out. It was perfect for our first time in however many years. A gentle, slow moving thin sheet of salty water flowed over our feet and engulfed them in smooth warmth. All 20,000 of my nerve endings opened up and began to breathe again. For one brief moment I was in heaven. My feet sank into the sand with each new wave and I felt the warm salty water creep up my legs toward my calves. Had it not been over 100 degrees outside I might have stood in that water on the edge of the ocean for a whole day. But the sun was giving me a strong warning to not toy with him on this day. I listened and retreated to the shade of the palm trees, promising myself to come back another day when it wasn’t so hot.
For this last month, my senses were open and alert, and I had the luxury of really paying attention. It was as if on that first day of leaving the campground in Oregon, I woke up from a long nap and could see with new eyes and hear with new ears. My nose was ready to be filled with the scent of ocean air, and my taste buds and finger tips ready for something new each day. I am so glad that I WOKE UP and that I PAID ATTENTION. What a gift to have given myself.
My wings may still be bent and uncertain, but, in time they will take me to exactly where and what I need to be.
on the road to simplicity 