Facebook showed me a memory this morning.
Three years ago today I posted a picture of three blue suitcases and a backpack sitting on the carpet, and I wrote: “I have reduced my worldly goods to this.”
I was getting ready to make the move to the Philippines. That really was everything I owned in the world, and it all had wheels.
All of it blue. If you were to ask me, I’d say I don’t have a favorite color. But maybe it’s blue.
Getting it down to that wasn’t hard. I’ve never been terribly attached to things.
I have a bunch of family photos, but I digitized them, and Anju now has custody of the originals.
I have the hat my dad wore the day I helped him move from South Carolina to Connecticut. That hat hung on the wall in the AdventureMobile while I traveled all over North America, and is still with me.
And in the kitchen in Dueñas there’s a hot pad that used to belong to my mom.
That’s about it for the things I’d hate to lose, and none of them take up much room.
Three years later, I have the farm and the house and the well and the water tower on one side of the world, and the truck and the RV and all the stuff to keep them going, on the other side of the world.
In Dueñas, I have Inday and Edrian and my Filipino family. In America, I have Anju and my brothers and their families.
I never saw that coming.
The suitcases are stored under the bed in the trailer now, so I can move back and forth, as I’ll be doing in a few weeks.