This is an autobiographical post. The names of people and places may be changed.
We decided to write autobiographical posts about the colorful life we have lived. There will be tales of sleeping in a campervan on the beach, of defending a bird’s nest from a snake, and of running away from wolves while sick with bronchitis. There will be tales of diagnosis with PTSD and ADHD and how it changed our lives, of meeting biological family, and of job loss. It’s a tale of overcoming challenges, of finding out who we are, of love, hope, cats, and of a marriage that’s gotten stronger through it all.
Autobiography Post 9
“We will never leave this home. I love it.”
“Me, too. I don’t want to leave.”
“The only reason I can see us leaving is if we have horrible neighborhood problems.”
“Yeah, definitely.”
It turns out, when we did decide to sell our house three and a half years after building it, it was for a completely unexpected reason. We loved our house. Still do. The layout was wonderful, the size was perfect for us, the interior was beautiful. However, the yard was unmanageable with rocks and cacti, there were lots of scorpions and spiders that got inside, and not all of the neighbors were noise-friendly. But none of those were the reasons we sold a house we loved so much.
In 2019 we both started working from home. Technically I had a brief stint in 2018 working remotely before the company went through layoffs which landed me back in an office. I hated it and I wanted to return home. I was able to get a new job only a few months later and return to remote work. Dorian followed only a couple of months after. But we’ll get into all that in a later post.
We still sometimes thought about the Dark Times, when we were both laid off and almost got jobs in California. Those jobs didn’t work out, and we moved on, but in the back of our minds there was that thought. That we almost did something adventurous. We almost did something exciting.
Do you know much about Oklahoma? We both were born and raised in this state. We hated it! We hated the weather with the tornado-filled springs, incredibly hot summers, and ice-storm winters. We hated the politics and the lifestyle and lack of things to do. Growing up we both had independently fantasized about moving somewhere better, but as adults with bills and responsibilities, that seemed so far-fetched.
One night, at the start of 2020, I had a dream. In that dream was my adoptive mother. She said, “I didn’t encourage you to get your degree and achieve all of your goals for you to just remain stuck in Oklahoma your whole life.”
Of course, she would never actually say this in real life. She was born on a farm and raised in a trailer park and liked the country. Even living in a suburb, she liked to pretend she was still living a very rural lifestyle, but with all the amenities of shopping and restaurants close by. When we would go to events in Tulsa, she would say things like, “Oh, we’re just from the country, we don’t know much about the big city.”
This was, of course, ridiculous, as she worked in Tulsa for 30+ years at this point and we went to the city most weekends for activities.
When I would talk about wanting to go on vacation to other countries, my adoptive father would say, “You live in the best country, in the best state, in the best town in the whole world. Why would you want to go anywhere else?”
That dream stuck with me, though. Dorian and I both worked remotely now. Things were going well. We didn’t have to stay here anymore. If we could leave, why shouldn’t we?
I talked to Dorian about my dream one morning on our neighborhood walk.
“I love that idea!” he said. “Where should we go?”
After much research and deliberation, we chose Colorado Springs as our destination. We had a potential townhouse picked out and were on a waiting list. Now, we just had to sell our house.
It only took two weeks to sell it. Our realtors were amazing. The only annoying part was having to hide all the cat items after one potential buyer griped they’d never buy a house that had once had cats in it.
We actually had already moved to Colorado at the time the sale was finalized, but in this digital age we were able to sign everything electronically. That didn’t make it super easy, though. Our bank was a credit union. There were no branches in our new state. We were told to get items notarized at other local credit unions, but each one turned us down. Eventually we were able to get our documents signed at a FedEx store.
Do we still miss our house? Sure, we miss the house itself. But we wouldn’t trade that for this amazing opportunity of adventure that has come our way. Moving to Colorado Springs was the start of something special in our lives. Something I’m eager to share with you all in future posts.
