Boxes and I come to a rest.

I’ve arrived (as such).

After 27 days on the road, I’ve landed in a place that’ll keep me a while.

Such the journey it has been too! Wrought with apprehensions and frustrations about shelter and money, lifted hopes when potential opportunities appeared and deflated ones when they didn’t pan out, which was most of the time.

A journey akin to crossing the Rockies, with its peaks and valleys, on a microcosmic scale.

A day of rest is needed. A day to do little but be hot — will hit 100 easily — and strive to stay cool and inactive.

My first night’s sleep in the new digs was made listless by a too-soft waterbed (the firmness/softness can be adjusted, I’m told) and a nightmare that shoutings of “Stop! Stop! Stop!” in the middle of the night.

I must inform/caution roommate Marcy in the next room of the commonality of nightmares and abrupt actions and shoutings they trigger.

Startlement met me as I unpacked my closet wardrobe last night.

was taken aback by the display on hangers. Every item save for two shirts and two vests is long-sleeved! And a solid quarter to a third is pullovers, coats or jackets!

If one didn’t know where I’d come from, one perceptive glance would certainly reveal!

I remarked on this astounding and troubling discovery moments later when Marcy appeared asking how the unpacking was going.

“Look at this!” I exclaimed, brushing my hand against the stretch of clothes suitable for fall and winter and explaining that even in summer in the Pacific Northwest, long sleeves are worn. They’re worn year ’round; layering is the regional art.

God I do not miss that fucking climate!!

Yes, in the four short {not really} weeks out, my health and well-being have taken a turn for the better that was immediate and discernible.

Chief among them is a lifting of depression. As if a 10,000-ton boulder of gray and dampness had been raised and removed, releasing and enabling the flow of dammed and pent-up life energy.

Then the sunshine. Oh what can I write about the sun that has not or was not already written during the depths of its lack.

This first morning of Having Landed … Resting … Pausing brings the first cup of homemade java in more than a month. Not only is it better coffee than what I’ve become accustomed to {not really} at the motels but the pleasure of the brewing process itself is satisfying.

Though the grind’s stale after having traveled for a month some 1,500+ miles from Tacoma, filtered into a comfortable {albeit borrowed} mug with some half-and-half, it is difficult to find fault.

It occurs to me that I’ve said little about the rental find: two women, mother and (adult) daughter, two dogs, two cats — three counting the feral partly domesticated by the TLC here, and a well-crafted and comfortable backyard and patio that get plenty of use outside of winter.

From that patio this first posting arrives.

On this first day “off the roads,” I’m a bit worn and raggedy around the edges, crampy and crimpy, including an annoying constricting crick in the neck, from the uncomfortable sleep and both glad and relieved to be at a place of rest and of stopping. And unpacking.

I’m blown away, btw, of how little I brought with.

Impressive at any age and particularly later in life.

The room I’m renting is quite small, though nicely done with care, and yet I’m still able to get much of what I brought into the little spaces long as I keep tidily boxed that which I can do without on a daily basis.

And that I do know about!: living out of boxes.

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