We left Michigan and went back to Texas.
That sentence sounds simple.
It was not simple.
Nothing about it felt simple.
We had just sold a house I loved.
A house tucked into the side of a hill.
A house with a pole barn, land, trees, chipmunks, and memories attached to places that probably looked ordinary to everyone else.
To me, they were not ordinary.
They were proof that we had built something.
For a while, I thought that was where we would stay.
Then life reminded me that dreams do not pay bills by themselves.
Work mattered.
Opportunity mattered.
Survival mattered.
And for us, at that moment, survival pointed south.
So we packed what we could, sold what we could not, and headed back to San Antonio.
I wish I could say it felt like coming home.
It did not.
It felt like retreat.
It felt like leaving a dream behind and driving toward something smaller.
Not just smaller in square footage.
Smaller in spirit.
We were not going back to a house.
We were not going back to land.
We were going back to an apartment.
A nasty apartment.
That may sound harsh.
Maybe it is.
But that is how it felt at the time.
After the Michigan property, the apartment felt like punishment.
It was temporary.
That was what I kept telling myself.
Temporary.
Just until we figured things out.
Just until we got settled.
Just until we found something better.
Those words helped a little.
Not much.
The apartment was nothing like what we had left.
There was no hill.
No pole barn.
No yard full of chipmunks.
No quiet Michigan air.
No feeling that the world had been held back at the edge of the property.
There was traffic.
Noise.
Heat.
Concrete.
And then, because life apparently had a sense of humor, life in Texas froze.
Not Michigan.
But Texas.
The place we had gone back to because it was supposed to be easier.
The place where winter was just a laughable fall.
The place where people owned more flip-flops than snow shovels.
Hell froze over.
That is what it felt like.
The cold came in hard and fast.
The town had never been prepared for weather like that.
The power situation was uncertain.
I was a record storm and some unprepared people died because of it.
The water became the bigger problem.
No water changes everything.
You can put on more clothes when you are cold.
You can sit under blankets.
You can complain.
You can wait.
But when there is no water, ordinary life stops.
You cannot shower.
You cannot wash dishes.
You cannot cook normally.
And worst of all, you cannot flush the toilet.
That is when civilization starts feeling very thin.
It does not take much.
A frozen pipe.
An empty faucet.
A toilet that will not flush.
Suddenly the modern world disappears and you are standing there trying to solve a problem people have been solving since the beginning of time.
How do I get water from there to here?
There was a pool at the apartment complex.
Not a beautiful resort pool.
Not anything worth bragging about.
But it was water.
And water had become valuable.
So I got a five-gallon bucket.
I drove over to where the pool was.
I filled the bucket.
Then I drove it back to the apartment.
I carried it inside and poured it into a waste-filled toilet just so it would flush.
There are moments in life that do not feel poetic while they are happening.
That was one of them.
There was nothing romantic about it.
Nothing symbolic.
Nothing noble.
It was just me with a bucket of pool water trying to make a toilet work.
But looking back, maybe it was symbolic after all.
Because that was where we were.
We had left a house we loved and landed in a place where I was hauling pool water in a bucket to flush a toilet.
That was the contrast.
That was the chapter of life we had stepped into.
I even filled the reservoir tank for a second flush later.
That felt like planning ahead.
Not big planning.
Not career planning.
Not financial planning.
Toilet planning.
That was how far the mighty had fallen.
At some point, we spent one night at Lisa's sister's place.
I was grateful.
More grateful than I probably showed.
I have never been good at sharing misery.
Some people need to talk through every bad thing while it is happening.
I usually do the opposite.
I keep it inside.
I do not want to make my problems someone else's burden.
So I do what needs to be done and try not to say too much.
That is not always healthy.
But it is honest.
The apartment eventually said they would pay for a hotel.
That helped.
A hotel with running water felt like luxury.
It is funny how quickly your standards can change.
A few weeks earlier, I had been mourning a house on a Michigan hillside.
Now I was grateful for a working toilet and a shower.
Relief is a powerful thing.
Not happiness exactly.
Not joy.
Relief.
There is a difference.
Happiness lifts you up.
Relief lets you breathe.
And after those days, breathing felt good.
I remember the feeling when the water finally came back.
Relief.
One hundred percent relief.
And peace.
Not the kind of peace you get from sitting on a porch in Michigan watching chipmunks run through the yard.
A smaller peace.
A survival peace.
The kind that comes when the immediate problem is finally over.
The kind that says, okay, we made it through that.
Now what?
Texas did offer one thing I had missed.
Breakfast tacos.
That may not sound like much, but it mattered.
Michigan had many good things.
Breakfast tacos were not one of them.
At least not the way San Antonio does them.
There is something about a good breakfast taco that feels simple and perfect.
Egg.
Potato.
Bean.
Cheese.
Bacon if you are lucky.
Wrapped in a warm tortilla.
It does not fix your life.
But it helps.
And at that time, help was welcome wherever I could find it.
There was also a pond near the apartment.
Calling it a pond might be generous.
It was not laughable exactly.
It was im my opinion just infishable.
I might have caught a carp out of it if I had tried hard enough.
But I probably would have gotten a disease if I ate it.
So I did not.
That pond became another reminder of what we had left.
In Michigan, water meant something different.
Lakes.
Rivers.
Fishing.
The smell of trees and wet ground.
In Texas, at least where we were, water felt managed.
Contained.
Questionable.
Sometimes missing altogether.
Still, slowly, the apartment began to change.
Not because the apartment itself changed.
Because we did.
We started putting things where they belonged.
We unpacked boxes.
We arranged furniture.
We made small decisions that did not feel important until they added up.
Where does this go?
Where should we put that?
Do we need this?
Can we make this work?
That is how you make a home when you do not love the place.
You do it one small decision at a time.
You hang something on a wall.
You find a place for the coffee maker.
You figure out where the towels go.
You learn which drawer sticks.
You learn which neighbors are loud.
You learn where to park.
You learn the sound of the place at night.
Little by little, the strange becomes familiar.
Familiar does not always mean loved.
But it can mean survivable.
And survivable was enough for a while.
I do not want to pretend I was noble about it.
I was not.
I was disappointed.
I was sad.
I was angry in ways I probably did not understand.
I missed Michigan.
I missed the house.
I missed the idea of what our life there was supposed to become.
But I also knew why we were there.
Work.
Opportunity.
A chance to keep going.
Those words do not sound beautiful.
But sometimes they are the words that keep a family standing.
When I look back now, I can see that the apartment was not the end of the story.
It only felt that way.
At the time, it felt like we had gone backward.
Maybe in some ways we had.
But going backward is not always the same as failing.
Sometimes you step back because the bridge ahead is gone.
Sometimes you retreat because staying would cost too much.
Sometimes you go back because that is where the next door is.
I did not know that then.
All I knew was that we had left a beautiful place and landed in a hard one.
And somehow, we had to live there.
So we did.
We flushed toilets with pool water.
We slept where we could.
We accepted the hotel when it came.
We ate breakfast tacos.
We unpacked boxes.
We made the best of what we had.
And slowly, against my own resistance, that nasty apartment became the place where the next part of our life began.