After nearly eight weeks away, we flew home from South Africa in early February.
We were tired. The trip home took more than a day, and I was looking forward to a shower, clean clothes and sleeping in our own bed.
But something was different.
We were happy to be home.
We just weren't particularly relieved to be home.
Back in Irvine
The first few days were mostly ordinary.
We picked up the mail, bought groceries, unpacked and recovered from the trip.
Almost immediately, though, I did something that seems funny in retrospect.
I unpacked—and then repacked.
I went through the clothes we'd taken to Africa and packed the things I thought I'd bring on the next trip. I started looking online for travel gear that might work better.
We had just returned home after almost two months away, and apparently I was already preparing to leave again.
What About the House?
The larger question was the house.
We had talked about selling before we left for Africa, but nothing had been decided.
Then, during our last days in South Africa, Shirley began saying that she thought we should sell it.
So when we returned, we deliberately gave ourselves a few days.
We really liked our house.
We liked Irvine.
We'd spent years making the house ours, and there was nothing pushing us out of it.
But there was something missing.
Neither of us felt particularly pulled back to it.
We'd just spent nearly eight weeks living in unfamiliar places and had been remarkably comfortable doing it. We had much more travel we wanted to do. Keeping the house meant expense, maintenance and responsibility for a place we expected to leave empty much of the time.
On February 13, we met with a real estate broker.
We decided to put the house on the market.
Going Through a Life
Then came the work.
Carpets were stretched and cleaned.
Furniture that wouldn't show well was removed.
We started sorting through years of things we'd accumulated.
Some were easy to discard.
Others weren't.
Objects have memories attached to them, and deciding that you don't need something anymore isn't necessarily the same as deciding that it doesn't matter.
We kept reminding ourselves that we didn't have to make every decision permanently. Things could go into storage. If we traveled for several years, we could deal with them later. If we changed our minds and settled somewhere sooner, they'd still be there.
The goal was simply to get the house ready.
Staging and photographs were scheduled for March 5.
Then the house would go on the market.
Conveniently, we already had a trip planned.
We were leaving for Cancún on March 13.
The House Goes on the Market
The house was staged on Thursday and listed the following Monday.
Then came the cleaning and open houses.
Suddenly the house we loved wasn't entirely ours anymore.
We were cleaning it for strangers.
Leaving so people could walk through it.
Waiting to hear how many people came and what they thought.
The day before leaving for Cancún, we spent much of the day packing and preparing the house for another evening showing.
We were both stressed.
And now that selling the house was becoming real, we both wondered whether we were making a mistake.
We really did like this house.
The problem wasn't that we wanted to leave it.
The problem was that there was another life we wanted to explore.
I wrote at the time that we had to remind ourselves:
The house was part of the previous chapter. Global mobility was part of the current one.
But that didn't make leaving easy.
What We'll Remember
We'll remember coming home from almost eight weeks of travel and realizing that neither of us had particularly missed Irvine.
We'll remember unpacking from Africa and almost immediately repacking for whatever came next.
We'll remember going through years of possessions and discovering how much emotion can attach itself to ordinary things.
We'll remember watching our home become a house for sale.
And we'll remember how strange it felt to voluntarily give up something we genuinely loved—not because anything was wrong with it, but because keeping it might make it harder to discover what came next.
Would We Do It Again?
At this point, we didn't know.
That's important to remember.
We hadn't sold the house.
We didn't know where we would live afterward.
We didn't know whether we'd travel continuously or eventually establish another home base.
We had plenty of travel planned, but there was no new home or destination pulling us toward it.
We were giving up something known for something we couldn't yet describe.
And we weren't completely comfortable with that.
On March 13, we locked the door and headed for LAX.
The house stayed behind, staged and ready for strangers to walk through.
We flew to Cancún.