Uncomfortable Places I Have Slept

 

US Interstates 41, 24 and 75 Between Terre Haute, IN and Atlanta

I've decided to focus my current writing on the places I've slept in that were not comfortable, physically or otherwise. This is the most recent. Our family, my wife, her mother, and I, made a very sudden decision to move from the Midwest to Macon, GA to both avoid the cold and the Seasonal Affective Disorder from which we all suffer. This involved my retirement so I could collect social security and selling our home by Lake Michigan, packing two homes’ worth of belongings and furniture, buying a new home in Georgia, and preparing a new and more southern mindset.

I donated 900 books from my library to a friend who had opened a used bookstore in the city. We gave away hundreds of dollars in clothing, appliances, equipment, as well as throwing away a lot. At one point, we hired a company to haul away junk from our garage. We segregated what we were tossing and what we were keeping and Jayne, who was home when they came by, pointed out the corner of the garage where the toss pile sat. But they took everything, including wheelbarrows, tools, bicycles (fortunately the ones we were moving with were in the basement), even shovels and rakes. Who takes shovels and rakes?

The weeks between our decision, finding an appropriate new home and selling ours seemed very, very slow but in retrospect they went incredibly quickly, and the day we closed on the sale of our house the company moving our belongings was packed by about 3, we loaded all 11 of our dogs and cats in my wife’s larger car, signed the papers, and drove 17 hours to make it to the signing for our new home in Macon at 10 the next morning. We made it there at exactly 10.

My wife doesn’t much like it when I drive so she did most of it, sleeping only when she felt exhausted. I was crumpled in the front seat, but as I’ve proved over and over, I can sleep nearly anywhere and in any position. Once the sun went down and we’d passed through Illinois, I slept off and on with a few waking periods. The photo above shows my wife driving with one of our dogs on her lap throughout the journey. Because I had the greater freedom, I rode with 2 of our dogs on my lap, only to discover, about the time we reached the northern outskirts of Atlanta, that one of them had been incontinent in his sleep. I attended the closing on our home in a pair of pants with a long dark pee spot down the left leg, which was indicative of our new journey as possible.