We’re always rebuilding.

Last night Yvonne and I dismantled our wardrobe (aka closets in North America). It’s common for flats here to not come equipped with any (or, for that matter, heating and refrigerators too). We’re a bit of DIY-ers so we ended up building our own for the bedroom.

So why did we take it apart? Well, for one it had to be done eventually (as we’re leaving Australia in less than two months), but moreso we wanted to recycle the wood and screws into the bed for our campervan. It was a melancholic experience. Each screw I removed tugged at the heartstrings a little as little memories of our lives here flashed in my mind.

Each piece of timber that came off was like another piece of our lives here being torn down. To top it off, we sorted through our clothes too: what to keep, what to sell, what to ship, what to store, what to donate to Salvation Army. As the clock ticks down to our departure date we’ll be going through all sorts of these exercises, massively reducing what we’ve accumulated in two years.

But alongside the sadness we felt in disassembling the wardrobe was the excitement of what we would be doing with this recycled material. We are taking our past and reassembling it for another use in our future. We are rebuilding. We’re always rebuilding.