The Family

We did not get everything today. And yet both trucks were completely full.

There is still a lot of large stuff in the shop. Trash, but bulky. But by ‘a lot’ I mean 20-30 items; not an entire shop worth of stuff. The work done to date has been extraordinary.

And in the house, it’s a vacuum and a stepladder and some odds & ends. That’s really it. You could fit it all in a car. Maybe not a small car, because it is a stepladder. But it is a nothing load from the truck’s perspective. So it’s as good as everything.

Sigh.

Tomorrow will be my last trip there. Everything about the ranch makes me sad and it has been a huge burden these last several months – and yet I am sad to be leaving it.

This is not my type of landscape. I have no emotional resonance with Texas scrub. Give me soaring pine trees and mountains, any day. But in the last several years that we’ve been here, it’s just been their home. Landscape doesn’t really matter for your home. And then, when it wasn’t their home, we were free-er somehow to walk about anywhere we wished, to take the bulldozer or tractor here or there just because, and that liberty made a connection. And as we walked, Joseph told me this story and that story and pointed out these nearly hidden features and outlined how they had once been.

I knew they both loved it out there. I knew his Dad in particular was truly in the place he wished to be. But seeing such numerous and tangible signs of that happiness – seeing the energy and planning and life that had been there – in so many ways the ranch and Happy are connected. And we are leaving the ranch.

And yet – what we are doing is exactly what he would have wished us to do; what he told Joseph to do. We are moving into the future; supported by instead of burdened by this legacy.

It is still hard. And tomorrow we will say goodbye.