USA: Narrowing down, emptying out, closing in

Downsizing the past, squeezing through the gauntlet of the present, and launching into the wide-open future

Saturday. They just kept coming. Rusty old trucks. Shiny new trucks. Family minivans. Compact cars. Even a few motorcycles. The big SHOP SALE signs on the highway drew them in like muddy dogs to white pants.  

My welcome spiel went something like this:

Howdy, folks! Let me give you the lay of the land here. That big yellow truck there is our new life. All the rest of this is our old life, and it’s all got to go, ‘cause we are done with it. The house and the property are already sold. All that’s left is what you see here--these piles of lumber and lawn & garden stuff, plus everything there in the barn.

We have two goals for today: first, we want to clear out all this stuff; and second, we want to make you happy—like you hit the jackpot, like you found the best yard sale ever.

It’s a big mess and we haven’t marked any prices ‘cause we’ve been putting all our time into building that truck, but we want you to leave today with big, goofy grins on your faces because you can’t believe you got so much good stuff for so little money. So, if there’s anything that would be even remotely useful to you, we want you to take it home today. When you’ve made a pile of everything you want, just talk to Andy—that guy in the orange hat—and he’ll work out a screamin’ deal on it. Take your time and have fun. You can pay me on your way out.

They did have fun. They grinned and chatted and shopped and texted their friends to come. Some of the morning crowd came back for more in the afternoon. They donned work gloves and filled their vehicles with lumber and hardware, assorted plumbing parts and paint scrapers.

When Andy looked at their bags and boxes and said, “That’s all you could find? How about five bucks?” they insisted on giving him twice that. When he looked at the stack of beautiful hardwood they had set aside, did some quick mental calculations, and suggested $75 for the batch, they countered with a hundred and settled on eighty. One man with no treasures handed me a five-dollar bill on the way back to his car and said to use it on a gallon of fuel. The wad of bills in my pocket grew fat—more than we’d expected.

At two o’clock, I scribbled a new message on the white board. Everything still remaining was free. Almost everything.

I adjusted my standard greeting to:

Good news! You’re just in time. As of two o’clock, everything is now free—well, most everything. Andy there in the orange hat will point out the exceptions. Feel free to back your truck in here and load up everything you want.

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely! Have fun!”

They did.

Andy told folks they couldn’t have the old wood stove or the long steel beams for free, but everything else was fair game—everything except our engagement photo. The framed image of 1992 us in all our hopeful glory has been propped up on the peg board in the barn for most of the last year, for lack of a proper home.

What do we do with it? No one else would want to display it in their home. We could store it in a family member’s garage indefinitely, but to what end? We don’t plan to set up house anywhere, anytime soon. And if, ten or twenty years from now, we have tired of traveling and want to settle down, it will likely be someplace far away where the cost of living is low and our dollars can stretch further—like Central America. I doubt we would attempt to ship something so big and fragile.

Ugh. Saying goodbye to this custom-framed photo—the last of our prized pieces of large-scale memorabilia—will be tough. I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this one.

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We said goodbye to the last shopper at Saturday’s sale—after I took his picture with the big yellow truck to show his wife and brother-in-law—a little after four o’clock, then Andy took down the signs. Exhausted, we stood in the yard and stared at all the empty space. Almost all the wood was gone. The rest would be just enough for a campfire. The barn was nearly empty, too, a picked-over mess of dusty bits of this and that. Everything remaining could be discarded or donated to the second-hand home resource business in Missoula. We pulled tarps over everything outside, closed the barn doors, brushed the dust off our work clothes, and headed out in search of dinner.

How many yard sales have we hosted on this Montana property? The house and garage and barn and storage trailers were already full of my grandparents’ stuff when we bought the place in 2004 and arrived with our two large moving trucks. Then Andy’s parents moved here in 2007 with their enormous moving truck, but never built the house they’d planned for next door. Numerous assorted tenants over the years have each left behind stuff that couldn’t go with them to their next place. On top of all that, when we worked for Young Life, we hosted an annual sale filled with the community’s donated items so we could raise money for kids to go to summer camp. We kept the leftovers each year to set out at the next one. It’s been a lot, friends.

After this past weekend’s sale, however, we are finally discarding our set of sturdy signs. Aside from the things we still need in order to finish the building of our adventure rig and move into it, we have nearly run out of possessions.

Squeezing ourselves out of this current life

We don’t even have a proper place to live anymore, at least not by American standards. The family we were renting a fifth wheel trailer from needed it back last week. But Walter, our travel rig, isn’t at all ready for habitation yet. After a couple of days of rearranging, cleaning, and problem-solving, I moved us into the dusty woodshop to keep the spiders company.

One section of the shop is now tented off with lightweight plastic sheeting to make a sort of bedroom. It contains a borrowed bed, our clothing and essentials, two camp chairs, and a small aluminum camping table. Another small room in the opposite corner contains a sink and countertop with a couple of cabinets, so we raided the truck for a chest refrigerator and a portable cooktop, plugged them in, and called it the kitchen. Another tiny room contains basic bathroom fixtures and mostly functional plumbing. It will do until we can move into the truck.

It feels like everything is narrowing down, emptying out, closing in. Our dream of hitting the road and wandering as nomads—wherever the wind blows and the Spirit leads—is so close to becoming a reality. Although it is the one place that has always felt like home to me since 1975, we are steadily working ourselves out of any possible life here in Montana. We are only a few weeks away from leaving it all behind for good.

Diesel and Dignity

Our new life will be all about meeting people all over the world and listening to their stories. People who have too often been “othered,” relegated to the back alleys of the American mindset, will be our temporary neighbors, our new friends as we travel. We look forward to loving them well, just as Jesus preached¹. We will intentionally seek out opportunities to listen to them, learn from them, bless them and be blessed by them. Where possible and appropriate, we will seek to assist them with their needs, providing partnership or grunt labor and/or financial and material resources. With permission and relative anonymity, we will strive to tell their stories truthfully—via my writing and occasionally Andy’s videos—in hopes that others will see the inherent DIGNITY of all the various and diverse people created in God’s image.

After all, what is loving our neighbors, if not recognizing their inherent dignity as equal to our own²?

Using our big yellow diesel truck for dignity—its recognition and, where necessary, its restoration—that will be one of the overarching themes of our nomadic travels and the emphasis of my storytelling. I am a follower of Jesus, and He seemed to care an awful lot about loving people well, in practical ways, as a way to express our love for God³.

Thank you for all the great feedback on the new logo ideas. After the last two rounds of voting and comments, y’all convinced me to change my opinion. I’ve reworked the first draft a bit and come up with a new and improved version. So, without any further ado, starting June 18, this will be the new name and logo for this Substack:

You chose this logo. You have supported us and encouraged us all along the path thus far. We’re so grateful. And soon, you will have the opportunity to show practical love to the people we meet along our path to come.

Like the kind and generous folks at our shop sale this past Saturday, the ones who joyfully gave more than we asked (seriously, it happened so many times), you will have the opportunity to become a paid subscriber to this blog-newsletter-Substack thing—even though it is not required of you.

Paid subscription options will be as follows:

• $6 MONTHLY SUPPORTER—less than the cost of two lattes at your favorite drive-through

• $54 ANNUAL SUPPORTER—which averages out to $4.50 per month, a significant amount for many people in the world, but not that much for most Americans

• $75, $100 $200+ ANNUALLY (“FOUNDING MEMBER” STATUS)—paying more than is asked, just because, is rad⁴, as evidenced at Saturday’s sale

So, if you’ve been considering climbing aboard the big yellow truck by partnering with us financially, these will be your options, starting June 18. As I described last week, half or more⁵ of the subscription fee will go toward practical support of the people we meet along our nomadic journey, AND I will be writing rad⁶ stories about how and where that money is spent.

Whoosh. That’s probably enough for now. In the comments below, please tell me if you think the logo needs any further adjustments for any reason. Also, help a sentimental heart out and give me some ideas for what to do with that 32-year-old photo perched on the peg board in the barn.

Until next week,

Sherry

P.S. “Founding Members” will get personal, hand-written postcards from me from cool locations in our travels. Make checking Mail Absolutely Great Again! McMAGA!

1. Jesus took the famous Ten Commandments, the very ones everyone talks about posting in public spaces everywhere, and condensed them down to just two: Mark 12:28-31 NLT. From a practical standpoint, posting two would take up so much less space than ten, but these two general ones might make people squirm more than the very specific ten.

2. To put the whole loving-your-neighbor-as-yourself thing into understandable terms, Jesus characterized it thus: Matthew 7:12 NLT. If you are feeling confused in this complicated world and looking for some guidelines on how to behave toward the people that surround you, it doesn’t get much simpler than this.

3. A rather chilling passage about sheep and goats, if you really think about it. Matthew 25:31-45 NLT I’m definitely in favor of the sheep side, and I find being a sheeple pure joy, regardless of what the news says.

4. I’m a Gen Xer and I will say rad (short for radical) for the rest of my life, whenever it is the best word for the job. In this case, it absolutely is.

5. It works like this—we will use up to 50% of subscription fees to cover Walter’s diesel fuel—but never more than 50%. He will get about 12 MPG, which might seem low for a car, but it’s pretty incredible for a house. At the start, 50% probably won’t cover our fuel and we will need to supplement it out of our own pockets. As my paid subscriber base grows, though, we might be able to cover the fuel with only 40, or 30, or 20, or 2% of the subscription fees and the rest will go toward blessing others. That dollar amount could get huge!

6. Rad. There it is again.