I've been finding myself saying, "one year ago..." since this time last year. Sometimes, I even include such memories on the blog. And within the last couple of weeks, I've been saying it even more. I keep meaning to blog about these moments, but alas, I haven't. So it's too late to tell you how a year ago on June 30, we were finally leaving our house in Kansas before 10 at night, driving as long as we could before sleeping briefly in our car at a rest stop because Mister Man simply couldn't drive anymore. Yeah, we seriously did that.
Or how July 1 of last year, we made it to Utah in my poor, broken car, and fortunately, found a mechanic right next to our hotel. A hotel that allowed our dogs. We hung out there three extra nights with our dogs as the mechanic got our parts in and worked on our car so we could finally head out on July 4 in a car without air conditioning, heading straight through the desert. Which brings us to this time last year, us arriving at our California house with hungry stomachs and curious furry beasts. By afternoon, we abandoned them in a house without furnishings, a house they'd never seen before, and looked around IKEA and watched Monsters University in a local cinema before driving back in two cars (we picked up one from the airport) and drove past a huge fire.
For a lot of people, they can't believe it's been a year. For us, it feels like a lifetime ago. We barely remember that time. It's just this monstrous blur. I'm not sure if it's because it was that traumatic, or if it was just too much to consume at once, and too much to remember. I would like to think it's because we're settled now. We've gotten past the initial transition and the majority of the chaos. And now we're home. While we still miss some things about Kansas, and I certainly miss some of the people, we are now Californians. Or at least we're closer to becoming so. We were never truly Kansans anyway. We just happened to live there.
Happy Independence from Kansas Day! At least what I'm calling it now.
I'll probably continue to play the memory game, as I have that sort of memory, and I remember dates quite well. But that nostalgia, those memories don't necessarily mean I'm clinging to the past. I'm just cherishing our whole story. I'm going to continue remembering the good, the bad, and the ugly. Because those are all parts of our glorious tale, and the foundations of where we are now.
A year ago today, we drove down our street realizing we left our dogs in a strange place for hours, alone, and fireworks had been going off all around them. Like many canines, the big beast hates fireworks. We were so consumed by our own chaos, we hadn't even realized how unintentionally cruel we were being. We stayed home this year. We sort of owed them one.
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