When Lisa said those words,
One word that struck me harder than all the others.
Home.
It is so many things... It is a place, a feeling,
but mostly it is the people waiting there for you.
When Lisa told me she wanted to move back to Michigan,
I believe she said, "We should move home."
At least that is what I heard.
Michigan would always be home to me.
What surprised me was hearing those words come from Lisa.
She wasn't born a Texan, but spent most of her life there.
I had spent years showing her my Michigan.
The beaches.
The trees.
The small towns.
The cooler summers.
The places that had shaped me.
I expected her to enjoy the trip.
I never expected her to fall in love with it.
Without much hesitation, I answered.
"Yes."
It wasn't a difficult answer.
At least...
It didn't seem that way.
The difficult part came afterward.
As the miles rolled by, another voice quietly entered my mind.
Why did we leave Michigan in the first place?
The answer wasn't complicated.
COVID.
The lack of work at the time.
Opportunity.
I left for the same reasons I left the first time... Work.
You would think that Lisa being a nurse would have been in high demand at that time.
She would have been if she were a clinical nurse, but she was an RN manager, and companies had to cut down to survive.
So Lisa was faced with something she had never seen. She was laid off...
That was okay. She quickly found another job.
Then that job let her go too...
My job had become no fun either. Due to COVID there were no businesses opening to install. So I was put on residential.
The problem was I was an extra, and the system would route everyone else then give me the leftovers.
What that meant was that as a fiber tech who had installed multiple switches, routers, servers, access points.. I spent the day replacing coax drops.
I talked to techs back in Texas and their work didn't change. Texas had not shut down.
Leaving Michigan had never been about not loving it.
It had been about survival.
Now we were talking about going back.
And all I could think about was whether history was about to repeat itself.
Would I find work?
Would we be making another costly mistake?
Those questions stayed with me.
Lisa, however, had already moved on.
Not emotionally.
Practically.
Once she decides something, she gets to work.
She doesn't sit around wondering if the decision was right.
She starts making it right.
That has always been one of the things I admire most about her.
We asked our friend Tom to come over and walk through the house with us.
He looked at it the way a buyer would.
Room by room.
Wall by wall.
He wasn't there to criticize.
He was there to help us see the things we no longer noticed.
He gave us a list.
Nothing outrageous.
Just honest advice.
Things buyers would appreciate.
Things that would make the house show better.
From that day on, Lisa attacked that list with everything she had.
Power wash the house.
Power wash the driveway.
Clean out the junk shed.
Get rid of the old chicken equipment.
Organize the garage.
Every day seemed to have another project.
Another box.
Another pile.
Another decision.
I helped.
But if I'm being honest...
She carried far more of the load than I did.
More than once I found myself watching her work and thinking,
"She's working harder than me."
She never complained.
She encouraged me.
She knew exactly what was going on inside my head.
She also knew me well enough to laugh.
More than once she called me a worry wart.
She wasn't wrong.
I've spent most of my life trying to think through every possible outcome before making a major decision.
Sometimes that has served me well.
Sometimes it simply keeps me awake at night.
This move was one of those times.
While Lisa was preparing the house...
I was still trying to prepare myself.
Little by little, the list became shorter.
The house looked better.
The driveway looked new again.
The junk shed was finally cleaned out.
The chicken equipment was gone.
About sixty percent of the garage disappeared.
Every trip to the donation center felt like another small step toward Michigan.
I've always had a difficult time getting rid of things.
Some people would probably call it hoarding.
I don't think that's quite right.
I've spent most of my life fixing things.
Building things.
Finding another use for something everyone else would have thrown away.
To me, a piece of aluminum wasn't scrap.
It was a future bracket.
An old motor wasn't junk.
It was the beginning of another project.
A cable wasn't clutter.
It might be exactly what I needed five years from now.
This move forced me to ask a different question.
Not...
"Could I use this someday?"
But...
"Is it worth moving thirteen hundred miles?"
That question changed everything.
I found myself letting go of things I never imagined I would.
The wheelchair motors.
Boxes of hardware.
Tools I hadn't touched in years.
Things I had convinced myself would someday become amazing projects.
Maybe they would have.
Maybe they never would.
Eventually I had to admit that some dreams were taking up more room than they deserved.
One thing that was especially hard to part with was my draft beer system.
Not because I couldn't replace it.
Because it made me smile.
Years earlier I had broken the tap handle.
Instead of buying another one, I looked around the garage for a solution.
I found a twenty-two millimeter box wrench.
I welded it onto what was left of the tap.
From that day forward, every beer was poured by pulling on a wrench.
Whenever friends were over, I'd smile and say,
"Another pull on the twenty-two."
It was ridiculous.
It worked perfectly.
Looking back...
It was completely me.
Everywhere I looked, I saw little reminders of the person I had been while living in Texas.
Projects.
Ideas.
Things I thought I'd someday build.
Things I thought I'd someday need.
It wasn't just the garage that was changing.
It was me.
One thing surprised me during all of this.
Tom didn't just come over to help us prepare the house.
He wanted to read my book.
That meant more to me than I expected.
I'd spent years writing it.
Not because I wanted people to think I had lived an extraordinary life.
Quite the opposite.
I think I wrote it because I wanted to share the things I don't normally share.
I've always been a guarded person.
Not because I wanted to hide from people.
It just isn't my nature to tell everyone what's going on inside my head.
Most people know what I do.
Very few know what I worry about.
Writing this book changed that.
It gave me permission to admit when I was afraid.
To admit when I made mistakes.
To admit when I wasn't sure what the right answer was.
I don't want this book to paint me as the hero.
I want it to tell the truth.
The good.
The bad.
The mistakes.
Because if I'm going to leave something behind...
I'd rather leave honesty than perfection.
Around that same time another letter arrived.
The casino had decided to hire someone else.
It wasn't devastating.
But it reinforced the very fear I had been carrying ever since Lisa suggested moving back.
Finding work in Michigan wasn't going to be easy.
That doubt never completely left me.
Then something happened that made me realize this move wasn't just about geography.
It was about family.
Watching Lisa with my family has always made me smile.
She didn't simply become part of it.
She belonged.
I remember talking with my sister Elizabeth about a couple of friends who had recently broken up.
Originally, my friendship had been with the boyfriend.
We had worked together at Time Warner Cable.
When their relationship ended, Lisa and I found ourselves in the uncomfortable position that sometimes happens after people break up.
You have to choose.
As unfortunate as it is...
You usually can't stay equally close to both people.
We chose to remain friends with her rather than him.
As I explained the situation to Elizabeth, she laughed and said,
"Be careful, Don."
"We may choose Lisa over you."
It was a joke.
But like most good jokes...
There was truth hiding inside it.
My sisters genuinely love Lisa.
Honestly...
So do I.
As I thought about it more, I realized something.
I think Lisa fits into my family as much as...
Or maybe even more than...
I do.
That isn't because I don't belong.
It's because she has a gift.
She loves people.
She invests in them.
She remembers them.
She makes them feel important.
Watching my family embrace her meant more to me than I can adequately explain.
When she looked at Michigan...
She didn't just see trees.
Or cooler weather.
Or beaches.
She saw my family.
She saw people she loved.
I think that was the moment I realized...
She hadn't simply fallen in love with my home state.
She had fallen in love with my home.
Not the place.
The people.
The house was almost ready.
Tom's list was nearly complete.
The only thing left on mine was hiding a fiber line that ran from the floor to the ceiling in one of the closets.
What kind of crazy person runs fiber from their garage to their home office because the Wi-Fi sucked?...
Well... that would be me. Thank you very much.
I may be crazy, but I have a 10 gig connection to my server in my garage.
The listing photographs were days away now.
Standing in the garage one evening, I looked around.
It was strange.
So much of it was gone.
The shelves were cleaner.
The projects were fewer.
The clutter had disappeared.
For the first time...
I could imagine someone else parking their car where mine had sat for years.
Someone else walking through our backyard.
Someone else calling this place home.
I had spent weeks helping prepare the house.
Power washing.
Cleaning.
Sorting.
Hauling things away.
Getting rid of pieces of a life we had built together.
The house was ready.
Lisa was ready.
I had already said yes.
Now...
I simply had to catch up with my own decision.
Because sometimes preparing a house for the next chapter...
Is much easier than preparing your heart.