Originally Posted by
fabiodriven
Here I am, just over a year after announcing that I'd like to up and leave my home to travel and ultimately settle somewhere else. What I find on my mind lately surprises me. I still have the yearn to travel and to live someplace other than Massachusetts, but there has been one nagging tether holding me back. I pride myself on my lack of tethers, however there is one in my life that I cannot escape, not that I'd like to either. There is one detail of this plan that has literally kept me up at night and I told myself I'd handle, and that is my cat. I'm sure that may sound silly to many, I don't know that everyone gets attached to animals like some people do. I know some understand. I've been telling myself that she's coming with me because it's not a thought in my mind to ever get rid of her. She's been with me since she was a kitten and she always chose me over my ex for whatever reason, she's always loved me. She's been with me for 14 years and she has a very comfortable life here and she loves this house. It would be a shame to take it away from her, and I couldn't take myself out of her life either, not that I'd ever want to. It seems silly but she's with me a huge amount of the time. She's a shoulder cat and will perch herself up there and ride around while I cook, do dishes, do laundry, whatever really. She has to be in the bathroom when I shower, she sleeps with me, and who doesn't like claws to the eyeball at 3:43 in the morning? I wasn't trying to sleep anyways!
So the cat has a lot of personality, and I don't think I have it in me to turn her life upside down when she's had it as good as she has for as long as she has. It might seem silly, but that's what has kept me up at night. Whenever I go away she doesn't like it. She can tell when I'm packing to go somewhere and she pouts. She also gets jealous if I have women over. When we were younger and I went away for a few days, she didn't mind that much. These days I can tell she misses me immensely when I leave. I couldn't imagine if we lived on the road and she were cooped up all the time, which is bad enough, but what if I want to venture away from my camper for a day or two, or a week? Or go to another country for a few weeks or a month? This is what I think about. She's always been very independent and prefers to be the only animal, but she doesn't need strict solitude. She'll put up with other animals if she absolutely has to but would just as soon be the only one, so an animal companion isn't going to help her, and that's assuming there wasn't already the issue with space and being cooped up.
Also as I've indicated, my trip to Hawaii was definitely interesting and fun, but it was kind of tough on me. For whatever reason I ended up really sick upon my arrival, and although I got better during my stay, I never felt completely healthy. Because of that, I found it hard to enjoy myself to my potential there. I dealt with a lot of depression while there as well. These circumstances had an unforeseen effect on me, in that I was looking forward to coming home to my house in Massachusetts. When I leave Indiana for Massachusetts, I don't want to go home. When I leave Arkansas for Massachusetts, I don't want to go home. When I leave Thailand, or Germany, or Mik's place in NY, I don't want to go home to Massachusetts. That's how it's always been. This hasn't always felt like "home" to me, as long as I've been here, but for whatever reason when it was time to leave Hawaii for Massachusetts, I was ready. That feeling was perplexing to me, it took me a while to wrap my head around it, but I walked off that plane in Boston feeling better than I had in two and a half weeks, and I was really glad to be going back to my little home. It's one of the first times my house has felt "homey" to me.
In preparations for selling of my home, I began working on it inside and out. I had to fix an improperly installed bathroom ceiling (I didn't do it), which is something I have no idea how to do, but I did it and it came out really well. I have countless hours on the exterior of the house scraping and painting, replacing trim, boxing eaves, and adding and replacing gutters. The outcome of all that is, the house looks a lot better than it did, lol. Imagine that! I'd have never started doing it for myself though, but I couldn't imagine selling it to someone else without doing it. I sold a ton of stuff on Ebay and Craigslist, and I'd like to continue that trend, so it's made it less cluttery around here and I can focus more time on less things.
I think at this point, I have to just face the truth that as silly as it seems, I'm not going to be able to live with myself if I turn my cat's life upside down. It's not a cancellation of what I want to do, but it's certainly going to postpone things. For the time being, I'm doing everything I can to get rid of my huge toy hauler and get back into a truck camper. I don't know how that works because I still have a huge note on the trailer, but whatever. I still have a lot of time to travel for the time being and I'd still like to do that, then someday when the time is right I will sell and travel as I'm planning. It looks like it just may not happen as soon as I was anticipating. I've had a lot of people asking lately, so this is what's going on. Thanks for reading.