We began tackling the cleanup on our property this week. A friend came up with us and brought a couple of shovels and rakes to help us start the process. We decided to begin with an old Jayco travel trailer that we used mainly for storage.

It held the holiday decorations we didn’t need all year; things like wrapping paper, holiday coffee cups, ceramic Santa’s, and the like. It also contained a collection of newspapers from my university days when I worked for the college paper. I saved them because they had all of the columns I wrote. Columns that are no longer available on the university website. My fingers are crossed that I have another set in storage.

The job didn’t take us as long as we thought it would. It helped that the weather was gorgeous for December in the Rockies. The three of us managed to almost fill two construction debris bags in just a couple of hours. We moved the melted aluminum and burned appliances off to the side, then began raking up what was left.

I’ve moved past the shocked stage and into a kind of resignation about the whole experience. I think about those things we weren’t able to save—my cast iron pans, my parent’s ashes, the picture albums from my military deployments. I can’t even shed tears over the losses anymore; there are just so many. And that’s just the stuff that was sentimental to me. First Reader is dealing with the loss of her past also. Right now, we’re numb.

I’m not one to look back any more than necessary, so not only did we deal with the past, we looked to the future. One of our stops this week was to a place that builds homes. We talked to one of the sales folks and began thinking ahead. We now know what the approximate cost of building our new home could be. And now that I know what to expect, I started drawing out rough floorplans for our new home.

Until this week, we hadn’t really talked about what our visions were for our new place. Because we are both retired, we aren’t sure how that will affect our ability to get a home loan; therefore, we want to keep the footprint small. So, we started talking about it. I want enough space to have a playroom. Because we live on a slope, we want a walk-out basement that we can use when we have family and friends over. That space will remain unfinished at first.

We face many unknowns right now, but we won’t let that get in the way of rebuilding our dream.