A friend of mine made a massive life shift, from decision to done-and-dusted execution, in less than a month. This involved not only selling a home, but choosing a brand new community hours away from the one where she’s lived for 15 years, finding an apartment, AND moving. When I say “massive”, that’s barely touching the surface of what she went through. To add to it, half of said month she was out of town for an already-made commitment. It made for an incredibly stressful, fast-paced couple of weeks. Talk about decision overload. Whew.

We’ve been in the middle of shifting for what seems like years. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. What’s not an exaggeration is that we’ve been in the middle of shifting since we got back from the Caribbean in May, getting Mischief ready to sail south. Calypso has been a crash pad while Mischief is a construction zone. This means that Calypso is almost as torn apart as her sister; we can’t exactly put tools neatly away when we’ll need to haul them out again the next day. There have been boxes of sealants and paints strewn on the floor for a couple of months, keeping them at least cooler than the inferno that is Maryland in late summer. Getting to the lockers where our clothes are stored has been an adventure in stretching, stepping, and often slipping. I routinely hit the point where I can’t stand the chaos on the chart table (the only horizontal surface) so I ruthlessly shove it all outboard or onto the quarterberth, itself a mass of random stuff that we’ve pulled out for some project or another. Inevitably, though, this clearing (that helps me feel at least temporarily like we’re making progress) means that Jeremy can’t put his fingers on exactly the whatever it was he put there. Since I moved it. Time suck happens as we both try to find it. Not helpful for helping Jeremy feel like he’s making progress.

Four days ago, we made a concerted effort to move onto Mischief. I’d already been loading provisions aboard, so there was that. First order of business was installing the table, which has been shoved around from side to side on the settee as I clean lockers and stow food. We moved the last of the cushions aboard, grabbed some cookware. Made sure the all important coffee paraphernalia had its place. Set up the galley storage and bought a hanging shelf unit to make the hanging locker into usable space - no time to build shelves. After a full day of down the ladder up the ladder, hauling bags of stuff from one boat to the other, we realized we didn’t have time to move the fridge before the rain hit. I moved the coffee stuff back to Calypso, and we tucked ourselves back into that boat for another night.

The first night we did sleep aboard Mischief, I’d left all the veggies on Calypso. The more elaborate celebration dinner got scrapped in favor of quick and easy - spaghetti with jarred sauce. No sense braving the dumping rain to get an onion. Jeremy had to help me drain the pasta, since I’d left the pot holders on the other boat. That pot gets hot! Note to self - finish moving galley over in the morning. And clothing, too. How about bathroom stuff? Jeremy wants to shave.

We’re largely moved in, but every time I go over to Calypso I find more items to bring back. There are a couple of lockers still to be sifted through. Now we start packing Calypso for her winter in storage. Oh, and we need to move the van to where it will be kept this winter, too. All before we splash next week.

Outside the boats it’s the “throw up” stage. There’s an argument to be made that inside the boats it’s the “throw up” stage too, but we’ll leave that one alone for a while. When I mentioned this to a couple of friends in the yard, both of whom are also scrambling to get projects finished up to head south, one of them nodded. “Do you mean you’re so stressed out it feels like you want to puke all the time?” That’s not what I meant, but it’s definitely a possible interpretation. 

No, the “throw up” stage is where you’ve basically emptied out all the things, ready for sorting into the ever popular piles of “keep” “give away” and “dumpster”. We’ve got stuff from Calypso, stuff from Mischief, stuff from the van, stuff from the storage shed. It gets laid out on tarps in semi-organized bundles according to use. We keep reinventing how those bundles are sorted. And every night, to guard against dew or rain, we scramble to get everything under wraps. Mostly this means it gets grabbed and stuffed into the van, since that’s without question waterproof and also does not involve any ladders. We decided tonight that we need to be more deliberate about what goes on what boat and why, though the safety net of the house in Vermont looms large when we’re trying to figure out whether we’ve got a use for some expensive marine gadget that once upon a time we felt was critically important but haven’t used in 30 years. Still.

It’s overwhelming. It’s more overwhelming since it’s been going on so long, this living in between. When my friend first talked about what she was going to do and the timeline, I worried about her ability to pull that all off so fast. Now, though, I think she was brilliant. The in between time was blissfully short. No hand wringing time dithering over decisions. Make a call and move on.

I’m ready to not be living in between.