Life’s Non-linear Adventure

Life’s Non-linear Adventure

It’s 9:37 on a Saturday night, and I’m confined to my toddler’s bedside, which is actually my bedside, because she declares she is scared of the new nursery.

Whenever I glance over at her by the light of the computer screen, she lifts her pajama shirt, pats her round belly, and gives me a grin that squints her eyes. This is exactly why I continue to just sit here, typing, when I really want to walk into the living room and watch mindless Netflix while sipping the flute of wine my mother-in-law set out for me an hour and a half ago.

Ah, the magic of transition.

Over the past two days, we have packed and cleaned and packed some more. My four-year-old daughter also thought this was a good time to start wiping with paper towels instead of toilet paper.

This, of course, clogged the plumbing system, and when my sweat-soaked husband went to take a shower, he discovered three inches of raw sewage seeping up from the drain. Nothing like running over to the introverted neighbors’ house and, in lieu of saying goodbye, asking to borrow their plunger.

Did I mention the buyers were doing one last walk-through the next day, and that – for the first time in my life – I dropped my daughter’s full bottle of milk on the stairs, which cracked open and poured down the carpet, reeking like spit-up in the 90+ degrees?

This debilitating heat made it impossible to sleep upstairs in our unconditioned farmhouse, so we slept downstairs on air mattresses blown up side-by-side. At 3:35 a.m., our eldest complained that our youngest was sleeping on her side. When I got up to move her, they both started screaming, so we made French-pressed coffee, peanut butter toast, and hit the road.

Fifteen and a half looong hours later, we wound down through the mountains of Tennessee. The air was thick with steam, so we had to turn on the windshield wipers to clear the condensation. In the distance, over the green hills, the sun was setting in pink and purple streaks.

It’s surreal, returning home, when you know you are actually going to stay there. This morning, I awoke before the rest of the house and put on my wrinkled traveling clothes and went outside—the air already bathtub-warm and the cicadas buzzing in the trees, ripe with growth.

I walked down the black-topped driveway and crossed the road over to the red-dirt lane that my father-in-law had carved out, parallel to the woods. I walked until I arrived at the base and then I walked back up to the bluff where our house will be. Standing there, surveying the layers of mountains in the distance, I marveled at life’s non-linear journey.

When I was younger, I believed you traveled from Point A to Point B to Point C until you arrived at your final destination. However, now we have returned from our farm in Wisconsin to live in the apartment above my in-laws’ house until we build a shop for my husband’s business. We will live in an apartment in the shop until we finish constructing our home.

I will be thirty in less than a month, and I find myself soon returning to the very stage of life I was in eight years ago—living in an apartment in a glorified warehouse.

But I remain grateful for this oh, so magical and humbling transition. I am grateful that I got to stand in the kitchen today and listen to my mother-in-law and my mother laughing as they sipped coffee and fed bites of cinnamon roll to their grandchildren, my children.

I am grateful that, this morning, after viewing our land, I got to walk over to my sister-in-law’s house to say hello. And then my sweet nephew left with me, and he ran—his little legs pumping and arms slicing through the air—across the field between his house and his grandparents’.

As I ran behind him, I couldn’t help but smiling at his childish zeal as he propelled himself forward, and I realized that, once again, this journey of life’s a good one, linear though the adventure may be…or not.

Has your life ever taken an unexpected turn? If so, how?