Why We Sold Everything

People ask us this all the time. Sometimes with admiration, sometimes with confusion, occasionally with something that looks a little like envy. Why did you sell everything?

The honest answer is that there was no single moment. There was an accumulation of them — quiet at first, then louder, then impossible to ignore.

We are Lainie and Kelly. A married couple in our mid-fifties who have never really done things the conventional way, and who stopped apologizing for that a long time ago.

We met on a summer evening at the Bend Brewfest — Kelly working at Whole Foods, me at a nonprofit serving people experiencing homelessness. Three weeks after we met we were living together. Fifteen years later we are still in the same room by choice, still working side by side when life allows it, still the first person the other one wants to tell things to. We fell fast and we fell hard and neither of us has ever quite recovered, which suits us both just fine.

We have not lived a conventional life together. We grew cannabis off the land on ten acres in southern Oregon — farming, growing our own food, cutting our own firewood, living simply and completely in a way that most people only romanticize. When the power went out for a week we were fine. We cooked on the woodstove. We had a full pantry. We thrived.

We moved to Arizona for the sunshine and the warmth and because we had both felt, independently and then together, that grey skies were costing us something we couldn't fully name. We worked in travel, specializing in Western Europe — building other people's dream trips to the countries we quietly knew we would live in ourselves one day.

And then the pandemic came and took that world apart, and we rebuilt, and kept going, the way we all did through that time.

Through all of it there was a knowing. Quiet at first. One day we will go. Not a plan exactly — more like a compass bearing. A direction we were always pointing toward even when life required us to point somewhere else first.

Then two things happened that made the quiet knowing into something louder.

Kelly lost his dad.

His father had been disappearing for years before he died — Parkinson's and dementia taking him slowly, piece by piece. Kelly had wanted more closeness than was ever quite offered between them, and losing his dad meant losing the possibility of that closeness ever arriving. It is a particular kind of grief, quiet and deeply felt, that does not announce itself. It settles into the body and stays.

When his father died, we looked at each other and understood something that we had perhaps always known but had not yet said plainly: life does not wait. It does not hold its breath while you finish getting ready. It moves, with or without you, and the only question is whether you are moving with it.

Around the same time, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.

It had taken two years to get that diagnosis — two years of joint pain spreading from one finger to every finger, both wrists, my shoulders, my knees, my jaw. Two years of being told by doctors that my blood work was normal and I was fine. Two years of knowing something was wrong and being sent home anyway. The diagnosis arrived after the worst flare of my life — a morning when I woke completely unable to move, every joint screaming, Kelly carefully helping me into the car and driving me to urgent care.

The PA who saw me took one look and said: everything you are describing is classic rheumatoid arthritis.

I was shocked. Then relieved. Then something more complicated — a deep frustrated recognition that the burden of figuring out what was wrong with my own body had fallen almost entirely on me. That is a story for another post. What matters here is what came after.

They say RA is not curable. But it is manageable. And one of the most consistent things in the research is this: warm, dry climates make a measurable difference in symptom management. We had already felt this when we left Oregon for Arizona — the sunshine had done something for both of us that grey skies never could. Spain, with its Mediterranean climate and abundant vitamin D, is not just a dream destination for us.

For my body, it is genuinely the right place to be.

So we made the decision.

We sold nearly everything. We moved in with Kelly's mom in Bend — both to be there for her through her first year of living alone after losing Kelly's dad, and to save money and plan. We spent this time writing, researching, building the online businesses that will sustain us, and pointing ourselves with increasing certainty toward a different life.

We are late bloomers in the best possible sense. Late to find each other. Late to settle down. And now choosing to bloom again in a country — in countries — that feel like they were waiting for us.

The road has shifted a little since we first started planning — life has a way of doing that, and we will tell you all about it as we go. But the direction has not changed. The dream has not changed. The knowing that started quiet and became something we could no longer ignore has not changed.

We sold everything because we ran out of reasons not to.

We sold everything because Kelly's dad died and my joints started screaming and we looked at each other and understood that someday is not a real place on any map we have ever seen.

We sold everything because the conventional path never quite fit the shape of who we are, and we stopped trying to make it fit a long time ago.

We sold everything because the dogs deserve to feel Mediterranean sunshine on their faces.

And because we do too.

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