I want to thank all of you for the texts, messages and calls to Susan. She will eventually get around to responding to them, but she is currently in a lot of pain and I have her on strict bed rest. When she wrote the post Saturday night the pain meds had kicked in and I think she minimized just how serious her injuries are. According to the doctor she has first degree burns over 6% of her body which includes both her arms from the elbows down and her face. She also has several second degree burns on her arms, nose and forehead. We are keeping the wounds clean and keeping silver sulfadiazine cream on them, which is all we can do. She will not be making any public appearances any time soon and will have to learn to direct us all with what to do rather than doing it herself, which will be a learning experience for us all!
Again, thanks for all your thoughts and prayers!
It has been some kind of a week for our family! Earlier in the week, our daughter Sophie came forward and reported unwanted touching in I the workplace. This afternoon, I suffered second degree burns on my arms and a bit on my face. I will be fine but am definitely out of commission for the next little bit. Tonight, I am ever so grateful for pain relieving drugs. It could have been so much worse. I/we are learning that adventure planning is quite stressful. It is very easy to underestimate that stress and push too hard. Today, I did that. Tomorrow, I will not!
This has been one of those super choppy weeks where there is too much going on and much of it is out of our control. On Monday, we finally handed the reigns of our yard over to a company to help us. This is obviously going to be necessary when we are in Australia but there is something about growing up with parents who never hired anything out that has made us can do/frugal kinda people. While on the surface this seems like a great trait, we are at that point where we need a lot of help to make this adventure happen and yet it is hard to ask for help! We still have a bit of transplanting to do and some additions to the back yard but we are on our way to having that taken care of! Whew! Oh, and through this we have determined an apartment in Brisbane is sounding awfully good to us about now!
The other massive home project that we should have done a lot sooner is the enclosing of our garage. We finally had them enclose the door and now we are creating a separate lock out space as we ready our home for either rental management or friends to rent or a combo of both. Currently our back porch and back yard are taken over by everything that was stored in our garage as we have it painted, flooring installed and the dividers put in for the lock out section! Before we can have rental management companies come in to give us prices, we have to tame the current chaos in our home and restore some order. We must do all this while still going through stuff to take to the estate sale and packing things up for long term storage! No stress here! It would be easier to just say “this is just too much work…we already live in paradise…let’s just stop” but that would be short sighted and, of course, would lead to regret so….onward we forge!
In addition to the home chaos, our sweet boy Felix is away at dog training this week trying to address a few fear issues and boy are we missing him terribly! Of course, this too should have been done sooner but sometimes it takes a pressing deadline to make things happen. We want him to be ready for the plane ride to Melbourne and then the 10 day quarantine that will follow. We, of course, want us all to be good ambassadors for our homeland!
Fear is a powerful thing. Most of us are willing to acknowledge that we have some areas in our life where we have them. While dreams keep us pushing forward in life, being brave enough to leap toward those dreams is an entirely different matter! Lawson and I both did some life coaching while we lived in Atlanta and plan to resume that work later this year. We have learned much during this sabbatical as we have clarified what is important to our life! Now going for this long held dream while pushing through our own fears, we want others to know they can do it too! It is okay to look at your fears while also looking at your dreams! In fact, I would say it is really necessary! We have been talking about Australia for 12 years – 12! Dreams do not always happen overnight! We have had to grow and change! We have made many sacrifices and experienced many course corrections! We have lived small and debt free! We have foregone short term pleasures for long term goals! We have known pain and been hurt. We have taken that pain and hurt and converted it to fuel that pushes us forward! You can too! Just as our boy Felix is addressing his fears, we have and will continue to as we venture abroad!
Whatever your own hopes and dreams are, know you are not alone as you look at your own fears! I do believe the adventure of life is worth it! Be Brave! Happy Weekend Everyone!
One of the most amazing gifts of our time living here on 30a, has been the guy on the left of this photo! A true friend is an amazing gift and this guy is a true friend! We started as clients and became friends! As a super talented landscape architect, Brad creates beauty with all he touches. Today, he went beyond kind gestures by sharing his tools and his time trimming and prepping my parents yard for putting their home on the market. He also helped us bring a few plants to our home here in Florida to transplant. While my parents were master gardeners and created an Eden like refuge on their property, Lawson and I have struggled to try to keep things somewhat under control. The house and yard deserve to have the kind of love that lives right there with them. It has taken me a while to accept this fact. I long for the days of Eden that were my childhood all the way through my girls early years. 
There is nothing quite like our childhood homes and our childhood yards! In my case, there were not only beautiful flowers but fruit trees and all manner of vegetables! One of my jobs as a child was to “feed” the fig tree – aka composting. There are no longer the beautiful rows of veggies but the blueberry bushes and fig trees still remain. And, thanks to Brad and Lawson’s hard work today, the shrubs are looking way better. Thanks Brad for being such a great friend!
While the guys were busy working two hours away from home, Eve was busy babysitting Brad’s sweet puppy Biscuit back home at the beach! It was a fun day for her but she was most definitely tired tonight! Puppies require a lot of attention after all. All in all a productive day that inches us closer to Brisbane thanks to the help of a true friend!
For the past week, I have been frantically looking for my mom’s wedding ring. As we are readying my parents home for the estate sale, we are also packing up our home for long term storage and readying it for being in rental management. The amount of chaos is staggering and my normally organized life has been thrown into upheaval. Somehow in the packing up of some of the furniture in our bedroom, I misplaced Nonnie’s ring. I had set it aside to have it reset in a different setting and that’s all I’ve been able to remember until today! I am usually the one in the family that everyone asks “where is the….” and I usually can put my fingers on things so this has had me totally undone. It wasn’t the value of the diamond but the fact that it was my mom’s! The jeweler said “you know this is quite a flawed diamond?” to which I replied “yes, but it is incredibly remarkable that my dad was even able to purchase this for my mom at the time!” My parents lived with my paternal grandparents for several of their first years of marriage so a diamond of any kind is extraordinary to me and then there is the fact that this ring rested on my mom’s finger for 63 1/2 years of marriage (this counting the three years after my dad passed away)! Of all her possessions, this is one of the most valuable to me because it represents a love that has inspired us both! It is precisely because of my parents imperfections and the partnership they were able to forge in spite of them that I value this symbol so much! This morning after poking through the boxes and rubbermaid’s that are currently holding many of our things, there it was! How had I missed it? Well, that’s easy… the stress and chaos are kinda getting to me. I have second guessed so many times this adventure mainly because it is so far outside my comfort zone! Actually, almost all the really wonderful things in my life have put me far outside my comfort zone….
…..way out on a limb! While I am having trouble seeing the fruit at the moment, I do know it is there just like Mark Twin said!
” Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.” Napoleon Bonaparte
So, last Monday we handed the keys to my parents home over to the estate sale company. I only slept 2 hours the night before and was not ready for them to descend upon the house the next morning but descend they did. Before I could pack up the bedroom with our clothes, they were rearranging and digging into stuff. Lawson and I were so exhausted, so in a haze, we just left things we intended to bring with us. We attempted to go back and pick up some things this past weekend, but they had a workforce of a dozen or more people and we just didn’t have the energy to deal with it. What has surprised me about this whole process is how gut wrenching it all is. It is just stuff…my parents and plenty of our own mixed in with theirs….but this past week didn’t feel like a relief to have experts pricing items but rather grief revisited. It has been an overwhelming, emotional week! I can hear my mom saying “Susan, you’re letting that go?” Ohhh, my heart! And then there are all the things I packed up already and I wonder if I should have put them in the sale. It is exhausting!
In retrospect, I have done everything the hard way. I, of course, didn’t intend to, but let me offer a couple of things I’ve learned in case you ever must face this process. 1) Don’t wait too long. Give yourself plenty of time but don’t wait more than a year. I had what I thought was a brilliant idea to have family come and take pieces of my parents home with them. While my intention was good and there were moments that made me so very happy in doing this, it extended things long past the time I should have taken. I wouldn’t recommend this approach. I would say to give yourself time and that varies upon the individual but then set a date and let those special to you know when the estate sale will be. 2) Be realistic about what you can keep. There is an incredibly strong pull to keep it all and many people do just add their loved one’s possessions to their own often overstuffed homes and storage units. If there has been one thing that taking longer than I should have has assisted with, it is that the weight of it has helped me be more brutal with this stage. I would also say that when you limit yourself to a certain number of items or whatever method of limiting you use, the things you choose mean even more. 3) If at all possible begin this process long before death. I begged my mom to begin going through things and distributing them years before but it was not something she could do. Sophie has made it clear she doesn’t want us to leave her with this much to deal with (Eve doesn’t want me to let anything go) and I have used that as fuel to keep pushing myself to refine, refine, refine. 4) Lastly, do not wait to do this before a big adventure! That’s just dumb!
This cartoon is so not what I want to be saying to my children! This Australian adventure is certainly about fulfilling a long held dream but also it has pushed us to clarify what is important to our little unit. These months of preparation are grueling but so very necessary to move forward!
Both yesterday and today I opened boxes that smelled like my mom and both yesterday and today I have wanted to curl up in the fetal position! There is no preparation for death. There is no preparation for clearing out the family home. Forgive my language but it sucks…that is all!
Shortly after my mom passed away, I packed away boxes that I planned to keep forever. For the past few months, I have been slowly unpacking those boxes and looking realistically at what I really can keep. My mom was a child of the Depression so for her (and many of her generation) the acquisition of formal china, formal pieces of all kinds was very important. It was a measure of success. She also very much loved things that reminded her of her roots in rural Georgia….so formal with a nod to country in a lovely ranch style home was my upbringing. It was a beautiful upbringing but my tastes now are more Eames chairs and simple lines. I once dreamed of having a bed and breakfast with all my parents antiques, etc filling it but that dream has shifted and now I must let go! One of the best pieces of advice I have received was to pick a certain number of my parents things and allow myself to only keep that amount. It is brutal but effective! Even at this, I fear I am still keeping too much! In three days time, I must hand the keys over to the estate sale people so they can begin their month long job of pricing things. Again, fetal position is looking really good about now yet I must be the bamboo that bends!
More on what to do and a whole lot of what not to do (because I have done a lot of that) in the next blog post!
Today on my facebook memories, this video showed up! This desire to have an Australian adventure has been with us for some time! This was our application for World’s Best Job! My dad was succumbing to Alzheimer’s so we knew we couldn’t go and we knew they would pick a young man or woman in their 20’s (without kids) but we submitted this anyway! When you have a dream it’s what you do! Keep your dreams alive my friends!!
I have always loved Valentine’s Day! I think because I associated it with my birthday, which is on the 13th, and my mom always made these back to back holiday’s so special! I always felt loved and oh so very wanted! My parents were married for 15 years before I came along and I always knew how they had longed for a child. I was their long awaited Valentine! I know for many, however, this day can be associated with something missing. I found this sweet drawing from ellolovey in my insta feed this morning and thought how lovely, how needed even for those of us who feel surrounded by the love of our upbringing and those closest to us!
There is that saying “Be kind to everyone you meet for you do not know the battles they are fighting” and that is certainly true for my own life and I bet yours too. I try to post only the most positive of things happening in our life on social media but my life is not perfect/our life is not perfect. We have been intensely lonely in our time living at the beach. We came here exhausted from a decade of slowly losing parents that we loved and needed time and space to recover but the truth is, it has been a very hard place to live. Caregiving and death change how you look at life. Popularity, social standing…not really very important. Celebrating this incredible thing called life…yeah that’s important! Lawson reminds me that I might not be nearly as willing to take big risks if life felt perfect and I have to agree. Sometimes, it is in life’s challenges that we dig in deep and discover our own courage! Whether we are waiting for a partner, a child or community, we need to be reminded we are loved by those who know us. Here’s that reminder! You are pretty darn fabulous! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! And, if you are struggling in some aspect of your life, please know you are not alone! We all need that reminder on occasion…especially on Valentine’s Day! Happy Love Day from the perfectly imperfect Kelley family!
Today was a big day! Today we moved Papa’s tractor into long term storage. It was a bit startling to see her leave Papa’s garage without him. I am not a farmer. My father, however, was! From an early age, I remember my dad driving the tractor home with freshly harvested peanuts trailing behind him. One of the sweetest smells in the world, at least to a peanut farmer’s kid, is that of freshly harvested peanuts. My dad would eat them raw. I have always preferred them boiled or roasted. When I look at this tractor, I see my dad! When I look at this tractor, I am flooded with happy memories! I really miss my sweet dad! I have always said I was keeping his tractor but recently I have struggled a bit with whether I am being overly sentimental. I can hear my dad saying “Susan, this is not very practical”. Because we are also keeping Lawson’s small boat, I have decided for the moment to keep her. Our daughter Sophie talks about someday having some highland cows so I am hoping maybe Papa’s tractor may have a home with those cows. Only time will tell but for now Papa’s tractor is a keeper!
