The Hardest Part of Leaving

I have spent much of my life solo, I’ve traveled from place to place making new friends and leaving old friends. I’ve never really felt attached to any certain place or area. Although I must admit living in the mountains of Western North Carolina and being in Asheville has felt more like home to me than anywhere else. Still I feel a need to travel, to see new places and have new adventurers. Mayo and I are always talking about our bucketlist and how we don’t want to wait until we are too old to do some of the things on it. Mayo says our bucket will have holes in the bottom so that it will never fill up and we can keep adding adventures to our list. Its always hard to pick up and say good bye to those you love and have become more like family than friends. I know as difficult as it is for me, it must be even harder of my wife.
Mayo has live here for over 20 years, she has friends and friends of friends. She is loved by everyone she knows and everyone that knows her. Most of all she has family here. She has 3 sons and 3 grand sons. She has a young granddaughter here in Asheville. She has a daughter in law that’s more like a daughter and best friend. There are kids that grew up with her kids and parents of those kids who still keep in touch. I know and love them all, but I don’t share the same relationship with them as Mayo. A mother’s love is something that words sometime can never explain, so I will not attempt to explain it. I can only tell you what I see and feel when we talk about this matter.
Mayo always smiles and says “ I’ll be okay,… we’ll come up often to see them or we’ll have them come stay with us.” I usually reply saying something like “ Hey, hey, wait a minute, no need to ruin a good vacation by having them come stay with us.” ….. “ Can’t we just send them a post card saying having a great time, wish you were here!” I don’t know why she puts up with me. I think she knows that in my heart I love and will miss them too, just can’t let them know it,.. it will go straight to their heads.
That’s the hardest part of leaving. Missing our family and friends. Missing being able to call them up and say “Hey what’cha up to today,.. wanna come over and hang out?” or “bring the grand kids over let them spend the night!” It seems that every issue ends up with a call to Mayo for advise. They may be full grown with kids and relationships of their own, but they will always be her babies and grand babies. She will always be their Mayo. So even though she smiles and even though she will be happy to travel and sun her buns on the warm sandy beaches. I know the love in her heart for her kids. I now know the hardest part of leaving.

The Herculean task of downsizing!

You would think to “have nothing” would be a simple task, an easy thing to do. It wasn’t until we decided to travel full time that we discovered we had so much stuff. I mean, stuff to the tenth power. We had stuff in our attic, stuff in our basement, stuff in the barn, and stuff in the closets. Our home had become one part living space and three parts storage .
I call it stuff because most of it, we had no more use for, nor did we remember why we still had it. Some of it had been store for so long that I don’t recall buying it. I had boxes of paper for things I no longer owned and paid receipts from years ago. I had clothes I couldn’t fit in anymore and wouldn’t wear if I could. Between my stuff and my wife’s stuff, which I believe doubled my stuff, though she would never admit to it,We could actually furnish a small apartment. We had boxes of pictures, old nicknacks, old shoes, tools, books, dishes and furniture we weren’t using,…..just stuff.
The good news is, people like to buy “stuff”, so the first thing we did was have a yard sale. For two days we had folks in our yard looking at stuff, pawing it over and asking for a deal,.. and even though it was just things I was trying to get rid of, for some reason I felt I should get a good price for them. My wife just laughed saying, “I just want this stuff to go away!”
The yard sale went well, but we were still left with a lot more stuff. Mayo began giving things away to family and friends. We donated items to goodwill, but we still had stuff. It was really an awakening process for us, because we had always tried to live small. We recycled and reused, we’d re-purposed and re-loved items. We are not materialistic at all and barely shop for things other than food, but somehow over the years we’ve collected so much.
The process of downsizing was more of a cleansing process to me. I felt as if I was getting rid of my past and making room for a wonderful future. But more importantly I was living in the now. I was seeing who I am and where I am now. I could see how I had outgrown my past and how I have changed my perspective of life. I also realized that I had held on to most these things for reasons like, “just in case I may need them” and that by letting go of these things I was also letting go of the fear of needing them. I’ve always said people do things for 2 basic reasons, Love or Fear. We either do thing because we love it and care about it or we do things because we fear the consequences of what may happen if we don’t do it. I want to live a life full of love. I love my wife. I love my Life. I love art, music, camp fires, traveling, sunsets, and long walks on sandy beaches, these are the things I want to store in all my empty spaces.
Now to get rid of some of this stuff… Because after all of our efforts…only our attic was empty! Oh Brother…

Honey RV There Yet?

In a world where you are measured by the amount of your possessions, honored for your wealth and material things, and given great respect for your money and job title. In a society where more is better, big is best and only those who have the most are consider successful .
My wife and I have chosen to live small, to have less, to live in peace with the very least. To live light, travel light, to eat light and live in the sunlight.

This is where our story begins;
After running a business for 6 years and a 5 acre farm for the past 2 years. My wife and I had an epiphany. We realized that we have no mortgage , no car payments and that all our debt and bills come from running a farm and business .
So why are we running a farm and business ? I love to be in the garden, to play in the dirt and to grow plants. We are farming to be more sustainable and to have healthy food. We also would like to support our community by providing healthy organically grown food. In our hearts we believe all these thing to be important, but at the same time we felt held down by both the farm and the business . In order for us to take a four day weekend vacation, required a 4 man team of people willing to take turns feeding the animals, watering the gardens and taking care of our greenhouse. Even then we would wonder and worry if everything would be ok when we got back home, not to mention the debt we were creating monthly, while trying to create an income to pay for the debt we were creating monthly, while trying to create an income to pay for the debt!… I could write this over and over again because its the same vicious cycle that happens over and over again every month. We had bills for the farm and the same bills for the business. We had two water bills, two phone bills, two electric bills and so on and so on.
My wife, Mayo, and I both love to travel. My wife’s Father was a Park Ranger so she grew up moving from one state park to another. She’s grew up spending more time outdoors and near nature. I grew up in the inner city, but have always wanted to see more of the world. My full adult life I have moved around constantly seeking nature and the adventures of the outdoors. I met Mayo because I was looking for a place to camp during the summer months. I had an apartment but no backyard. In my local paper there was an ad for 2 acres of land in the country for rent. I planned to rent this land to camp on the weekends and my days off. On my way to rent this land I missed my turn and ended up on the wrong road. At the end of the road there was a huge greenhouse business named “Painter’s Greenhouse”. Because of my love for plants I stopped to chat with the owners, who were very impressed with me, they offered me a job on the spot. A month after working there Mayo walked in looking for plants. She found me and we found endless love,… That was the start of our wonder marriage.
It’s winter time now, and my wife Mayo who is from Florida does not like the winters in Asheville North Carolina even though she has lived here 21 years. To me, winter is always a time of planning for warm weather and waiting. I hate waiting……. We usually plan a weekend trip somewhere sunny and warm, but were having trouble coordinating a team for the farm.
It was at this moment that it hit us……Well, it hit my wife first and she bounced it off to me. She said, “Why are we doing this, why are we planning to go traveling for the weekend or just a few days, why not make vacationing and traveling our way of life” It was so amazing to me because I had just read a quote that said , ” I’ve spent so much time making a living I forgot to make a life”, or something to that effect. So we began to think about our situation and realized we really have no bills or debt if we just traveled. We have an RV that’s paid for, and if we rented out the farm and business we would make more income than we’ve had running the farm. Now I don’t have a doctrine or PHd but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one out .
We thought about it for a few days and each day the thought of traveling became more and more appealing. Like a bright light going off in our heads we said ” lets do it, lets see all there is to see, let’s boldly go where we have never gone before, meet people we’ve never met before, see nature and live stress free . Our thoughts went from why, to how and then to When?!
My wife, Mayo, began her research. She is the google gypsy queen, if there is information out there to be found, she will find it! Lol, and if she finds it I’ll hear about it.
She has researched RV living, living in small spaces,tiny house living, boon-docking, cheap places to camp and all of the national/state park camping. I can’t wait to see what she’ll research tomorrow ….smile. Ajani Eagledove