Sitting here in our living room on the eve of leaving for Minnesota, I feel the hum of something ending and something beginning. Jody and I are selling our Minnesota home of twenty-five years, and we are ready to lovingly pass it to another family.

I look around our Florida home and it no longer feels like an Airbnb, as it did at the beginning of the season. Jody and I have made it ours. Nothing has changed, really—the same living room pieces, the same dining room table, the same buffet—but everything has changed because it is lived in. Claimed. Ours.

We’ve hosted many poker games here. New friends who became old friends. Laughter in the kitchen, cards sliding across felt, stories told and retold.

Jody and I are standing between two homes: one built over twenty-five years through labor, parenting, maintenance, memories, and endurance; the other built through choice, community, friendship, play, and reinvention. Neither house is the true source of belonging. Jody and I are. We made both homes alive. We can do it again anywhere.

Even traveling the summer months in our RV.

We’ve learned home is not a place we keep—it is something we create, carry, and recreate.

And, how are the children? At twenty-four, with a degree in environmental science under her belt and an apprentice electrician’s card in his pocket, they are forging their own path

How are the adults?

Dang—we are hitting the road.

After building a life for others, this is the season Jody and I built one for ourselves.