Time to Move On

For 19 years, I've written this blog.  

I started it after my father died. My early entries were about aging, mortality--and still feeling his presence. 

Sisters (I'm the middle child, the brunette) with Dad

My third entry was about giving my mother a bath because the month after Dad died, she fell and broke her shoulder. 

As she descended into dementia, I wrote about her life, about caregiving, about grief and love.

Scanning through my years of writing Living the Journey has made my life swim before my eyes. It's been bittersweet to see the evolution of what I wrote about. 

The first few years I focused on:

* Ailing parents (both mine and my partner's)

* Marriage equality and LGBTQ rights

In California, 2008, protesting Prop 8, which would ban same-sex marriage

* My work as a university writing professor (I hated grading papers, loved connecting to students, and appreciated the creativity and flexibility of my work)

* Meeting great visiting writers in my role as as co-director of the Center for Literary Arts

* Book reviews

* Interviews with writers and poets.

And then, one day I disappeared. My wife of 15 years had been having an affair and left me. My world was shattered.

When I returned, I wrote about heartbreak and figuring how who I was now. I wrote about being single in my 40s as a bisexual woman. I explored dating men again and, when the phoenix began rising, my renewed love for travel. 

During this time, my friends became everything. They propped me up, helped me move, became my cheerleaders. I vowed to never again take my friends for granted, and I hope I've lived up to that promise.

Then I met Dave. We both were working more than full time, but we were thrilled about creating a life together that included live music, the outdoors, friends, travel.

snowshoeing in 2010...we've now been together 16 years

We married in Hawaii, and the next year I retired from the university so I could write and work as a coach and book editor. His job ended. When the sweet house we were renting in our beloved seaside Santa Cruz went up for sale, we faced a dilemma: 

Should we reverse the retirement decision and put all of our resources into buying a house in one of the most expensive places in the world? 

We floated that idea and others--another rental, joining friends in a communal living endeavor, moving elsewhere--but it was when we hit on this that our energy surged:

How about living house-free?

This was 2012. We'd never heard of nomads--digital, retired, or otherwise. 

We'd already embraced a kind of minimalism, by living in small spaces, owning one car, and not collecting a lot of stuff. And now we decided to get rid of almost everything we owned and hit the road.

leopard encounter in Sri Lanka

We traveled in the States, Australia, India and Sri Lanka--and were sidelined for a few months when I was diagnosed with a brain tumor after having a seizure. It was a scary, soul-expanding time. (A friend said, "Honey, your life is like Knott's Landing these days!") 

staples out! (2013)

Once I was healed and we'd traveled for a year, two things happened:

* we bought a casita sight-unseen in Mexico and

* we discovered housesitting.

My sister had talked for years about how she loved Baja California Sur. She'd bought a little place and one was being built next to hers. The price was affordable for us--a fraction of what we'd have to pay to be near the beach in California--so we went for it. We liked the idea of having a home base while we continued to travel. And we figured if we didn't like it there, we could rent it or sell it. (Spoiler: 12 years later, Mexico has become home.)

Playa Los Cerritos 

Housesitting made our dream of continuing to travel sustainable. As I wrote about in this blog and in Wanderland: Living the Traveling Life, we have stayed in homes all over the world for free, taking care of people's pets. We also lived in China for a year (where I stepped out of retirement to teach university creative writing). 

The last portion of this blog, then, focused mostly on traveling as slow-mads and living in Mexico, with the heart of my quest being , "What is home?"

Now that I'm ending this blog, I'm moving my writing over to Maybe I'm Amazed, my  Substack. I'd love for you to join me there. It will always be free, and I'll be continuing to write about my obsessions:

* housesitting

* living in Mexico

* travel and staycations

* social justice

* being a woman in her 60s 

* books

* dogs 

Regarding that last topic, I haven't had my own dog since Dave and I left California 14 years ago. I've adored caring for so many pups while housesitting. Has the time come to get my own again? Stay tuned at Maybe I'm Amazed. 

It doesn't get better than dogs and books
(housesitting in coastal England, 2024)

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Check out my new novel, Amazing!, which is getting great reviews.