Each step is a BIG step closer...

We have had lots of little steps to transition to our mobile life.

The reality is, they are all BIG steps! Saying goodbye to "things" I thought would be easy. It's just stuff. I am not a very materialistic person, so this should be fine.

GULP. It's been harder than I thought.

There are a lot of memories tied up in your things. Shocker!

I've played piano since I was in first grade. We had an old player piano without the guts growing up. (The picture of the music box is a spitting image of it.) My four older siblings and I all took lessons; I took them the longest and "stuck with it", as they say. I sing and play. Over the years, many people would marvel that I could do both things at once. I didn't think it was a big deal because I had always done it! Many hours were spent on that piano bench in our southern Minnesota rural farmhouse.

When we got married and lived in our first apartment, Chad really wanted me to have a piano. We splurged and got a Yamaha Clavinova. It was the epitome of high tech at the time with an onboard hard disk drive! It had all the bells and whistles, with more instrument sounds than I would ever use. But Chad likes the tech side of things. It traveled from our first apartment to every move since. Which has been a few...Salt Lake City has been our 8th dwelling!

We celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary in 2017. We don't normally celebrate our anniversary in a big way..."Everyday is a celebration" has been our motto! Well, that year, we thought it was time to upgrade to a baby grand piano. It had been my dream since I was little. It was gorgeous and fit perfectly in our front room.

I've felt a little guilty about having the baby grand. I'm not a concert pianist by any means, no matter how many times Chad says, "She can sit down and play anything you put in front of her." He's always been my biggest cheerleader! I love playing and I can sightread fairly well. Am I the person that can sit down and just play something from memory? No. A piece was memorized for my piano recital each year, but that skill did not carry with me into adulthood! I envy people that can do that. My Grandma Agnes only played by ear; that was a true gift.

Sadly, the baby grand will not fit in the RV.

We decided to have Piano Gallery sell it for us. That's who we purchased from in 2017 and we felt it would be the quickest and simplest way to close this chapter. Our kids have other talents that do not include playing the piano, so it didn't make any sense to hang onto it. A moving truck and 2 gentlemen came to pick it up. It will be housed at the gallery until a buyer can be found, then Piano Gallery pays us.

There are 12 days and counting to clear out the remaining items from our house. Our 2 kids are coming to claim anything else they want this weekend. It's a weird line of "take anything you want, but please don't feel pressured into taking stuff". We have proven our truck can haul a load to our local Savers thrift store; 3 truckloads have appeared there already this week. What's a few more...