5.5.14 - The Jefferson Move

Last Thursday Dad rented the moving truck to take a whole bunch of stuff from his house in San Francisco to his house in Colorado. Some of my friends came over and helped us start loading the truck Thursday night. We continued Friday morning and early afternoon, and Dad was getting increasingly stressed because he was determined to leave early Saturday morning but we still had a lot to do.

Then he went to pick up his newly-repaired motorcycle, and while riding it back home, he got in an accident. He's going to be okay, but he fractured his pelvis. Obviously he couldn't take the moving truck cross country, so he asked me to do it. So I did. (Well, I didn't really--one of his construction workers drove the truck, I simply accompanied the guy in case he needed a backup driver.)

There are a few things I want to remember for my Joy Inventory:

1. There was a stretch of desert (I think it was still in Nevada) where some of the rocky terrain smoothed out to very light patches of sand with a lot of dark, almost black rocks among them. This stretch is on the side of highway 80 in the middle of nowhere--we hadn't seen a town and wouldn't see a town for awhile. But I noticed most of the black rocks had been arranged in the white sand to spell messages: "Hi!" and "Jake loves Andrea" and shapes of hearts and things. In fact, it looked as if there weren't any black rocks left that weren't part of some message. You could barely see the messages because we were driving by so quickly, but I was thinking of all the people over all the years that had pulled over on this stretch of highway to create their little piece of timelessness for all the other drivers to see. It was really sweet.
2. I live in the parts of California where the Epic Beauty is the ocean. I love looking at it. It's so vast, and it makes me think of what lies on the other side, and about how huge the world is, and the universe. But this road trip also made me realize how much I enjoy the Epic Beauty of mountains. They make me think of what it was like for generations past to travel through them, how difficult that must have been and how brave they were. And they make me think of the phrase "purple mountains majesty" (even though none of them look purple to me). The mountains make me think of AMERICA in a very patriotic and nostalgic way.
3. I also saw a lot of long, colorful trains sliding pat the country side with the mountains as backdrop. That was pretty and nostalgic too.
4. We finally got to Colorado and I'm staying in Dad's house here, but no one else is here. It's very strange to be in this house when it's empty, as normally I'm only here for big family trips like Thanksgiving. Late last night it felt kind of lonely, but then I came upstairs and saw my stepmom had put up a whole bunch of framed photos along the hallway outside the bedrooms. There are photos of my siblings and me when we were kids, photos of my step- and half-siblings when they were littler and more recent ones, and all the photos are memories of happy and silly and sweet times. I walked down the hallway slowly and looked at every single one and felt overwhelmingly grateful to have a family I love so much (especially in light of recent events, given Dad is still alive!)

Leaving California, passing through the Sierra Nevada.