Casting Off
Darryl August 20th, 2007
Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada… It seemed like a long push-off from the shores of the island of Eleuthera in the quiet Bahamas Family Islands, to sitting in a fifth wheel in Central Alberta Canada looking over a deep black field, moist and rich from this morning’s turn of the fall cultivator. Dozens of raucous crows foraged the rows for food to sustain their long flight back south - the path we had just come.
I fell into a muse about what had happened to us.
Nancy and I had owned a large property on Eleuthera for several years, twelve to be exact. It was a simple life on the surface. The constant sunshine and balmy Trade Winds kept us generally buoyant. However, Gordian complications only island people could know served up with enough regularity to be more than just distractions. Attention to passions and work habits kept us planted firmly between the native community and the itinerant foreign winter residents. We knew we could never truly belong to either group. Plus the strainings of our quiet island to join the so-called developed world was making us uneasy about what would inevitably be given up.
We were both getting restless. When the opportunity came up to pass the estate to a nice couple, it was not a hard decision.
For the first time in our lives, we actually owned very little. My shop, all the contents of the three houses on the property, Nancy’s crafts materials, furniture we had made, vehicles, tools … we left them all, keeping a few Rubbermaid containers of keepsakes and shells, a few of my musical instruments, and our art collection.
When we left, we were naked newborns. A few clothes and a coin collection accompanied us to Canada.
For the first month our conversations drifted through unresolved things about our last home and about what we had talked out with our friends and relatives that day, but eventually each would turn to how we should be thinking about getting a plan.
It was not as though we had never arrived at transition points before. We are parents and grandparents, veterans of business successful and failed, cancer survivors, career leapers, home gypsies, intentional critics. The difference this time was that this transition was gentle and pleasant, and of our own volition.
In the lightness of suddenly possessing nothing, we were confronted with a great breadth of choices. Would we find another home (where would that be) … would we travel… would we increase our activities in our software and consulting businesses… would we retire… would we start something new… how about doing nothing?
So after a party with our dearest friends, we shoved off. Just as we had washed up on Eleuthera those years ago, we were once more adrift.