Chester, Virginia

Stopped here in case I needed to empty out my truck. The weekend people sent me a load that picks up in Goldsboro, NC and delivers in Chicago. Told me it would be great miles. Hehe.

Okay, while I was writing that paragraph they responded to my mini-rant over the satcom and told me to pick up the load and take it to Greensboro, and they would bobtail me home from there. I'm relieved to know what I'm going to be doing and how I'll be getting home.

It seems so bizarre to think that I'll be going home for the last time. When I leave, it will be just before the foreclosure. So this is the last week I'll have a home for awhile. I know I'm going to be working hard next week, but I'm going to try to savor every moment. I'm going to find time to say goodbye to each of those trees that I watched grow up. And I'm going to have at least one night beside a fire in the backyard, sitting beside Hannibal's grave, honoring the lives that have lived there, and paying respects to what could have been. God help me, I almost pulled it off, didn't I?

There is no shame in defeat. Only in surrender. So I'm facing this week with sadness, but without remorse. That in itself is its own form of hope.

Oh, geez. A message just came in from my weekend dispatcher. He shared how he and his wife had been forced into foreclosure, but things had turned out much better for them in the end. He said he would pray that the same would be true for me. When I read that, I just broke down and wept. Obviously, there are issues of loss at play here that I'm not ready to face. It doesn't seem to take much to upset my determined balance.

I hope that someday when all this is memory, Mara will grasp what she has done and what she has cost me. I understand that people change and that perhaps love dies out. People move on. But this could have been handled differently. This ... destruction could have been avoided.