Empty House, Full of Heart

Our house was empty in the morning of the day we drove out of San Francisco Bay Area. But our hearts were full of gratitude, excitement, sorrow and all kinds of mixed emotions.

For vacating our house, we had tremendous, tireless help from Dave and Monica, who spent three evenings of their time for helping us. We underestimated the amount of efforts to move out of our house, and their helping hands were hugely valuable. We also had young strong muscles of Kaya and Tashi from Santa Cruz, when we moved out all the furniture into the storage. We can’t thank them enough for their support.

After 10 years of living in our house, we accumulated so much, even though Lyn got rid of a lot on eBay and we thought we were conscious of living lightly. How much stuff do we really need to live? I got sick of looking at them as they were being stored away, and it actually felt good that we had this opportunity to think about it.

On the other hand, we really felt what is really important in our lives. Not just words. We felt it. Our family members and friends kept calling us with the kindest words. We are truly blessed to have them. It’s a kind of realization that we might confirm during this trip, but we experienced it even before we started.

We both had a mentally hard time with leaving Willow behind. Willow did sense and eventually realized that we were leaving to somewhere. She followed Lyn around within 3 feet during the last few hours at our beloved home. She knew.

We drove out of our neighborhood around noon. Arizona was far, we were exhausted, but we pressed on. It was about 2AM when we arrived at Steve and Tracy’s house at the foot of desert hills just north of Phoenix.

The moon was getting full.