Does this mean you're staying?
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
When my sister and I moved to Kansas in the year 2000, we were traveling light. First of all, we didn't know just how long we'd be here. Could we survive? Could we make some kind of living? Would we really like it full time? Or would we yearn for city life and California's mild, consistent climate — among other things.
The second reason for not bringing everything with us was the age old question, "Where do you put this?" The Ramona House is small and doesn't even have closets. So, we brought what we called "Our Country Clothes," and left all the city things behind.
Every once in a while we'd say, "Whew, I wish I had that in Ramona," referring to whatever we remembered having packed away in California storage. "One of these days we'll just go get it," our buddy Tool Time Tim would say, "you just wait and see."
Well, this was the summer for retrieval. We hitched Tim's trailer behind his truck and headed for California. Along the way we joked as to how we would look once that trailer was full of our accumulated possessions. "Like the Beverly Hillbillys in reverse," we decided. Of course, I was nominated to sit up on top of the load in the wicker rocker.
For anyone who has lived in one spot for 30 years you know that going through your stuff is a tedious and sometimes painful experience. Once Jessica's boxes were loaded, we started on the garage which housed my families' history. Tim surveyed the mountain of things emerging and said, "Just tell me what is going and I'll start loading it on. Are we taking the teepee poles?"
Just how do you categorize, prioritize, sort, discard, file away, classify, arrange, group, sell, and throw away part of your life? At a garage sale these things wouldn't be all that valuable. To us, however, they were infinitely useful.
The teepee poles went on first — down the middle of the trailer. These poles were nonsense to anyone else looking on, but symbolic for me. Where would I get 25-foot lodge pole pine to put up my teepee in Kansas? I'm sure there's an answer to that question from a whole bunch of people with prairie ingenuity, but I didn't know what it would be, so the poles came with us.
When we were finished, we had several tons of miscellaneous goods loaded on that trailer, braced, boarded, tarped, and strapped into place. It's an interesting sensation to pull your life along behind you. It definitely slows down your ascent and descent on curvy mountain roads. At 55 miles per hour we had plenty of time to contemplate our choices and think about the future. "Where WERE we going to put all these things in Ramona?"
"These things won't be moved again," I told Tim. "We're either using them up or getting rid of them. No more cross-country travel for this load of stuff." So, did this mean we had honestly, truly, really, MOVED to the country?
For all of my little neighbor Emily's life, I've been her transient friend, her part-time neighbor, her pseudo-grandmother, her summer time guardian angel. Each time we left Ramona and headed for California she would begin questioning as to just when we would return. Would it be before Christmas? Would we return in time for her birthday? And then we came for a whole summer, a whole year, two years, and she still isn't sure that she can trust our presence. "How long will you be here?" she asks. And we give her a hug and say, "For awhile."
On the day we drove into town with the trailer loaded, she ran out to welcome us home. "Does this mean your staying?" She wanted to know. Well, it's another day in the country, and "Yep, Em, we're staying."
