Exactly 16 years ago today, my wife and I got married. It was a clever and strategic choice to be married on July 5th, knowing our wedding anniversary would always have a paid day off from work attached to the date before it.

Our wedding anniversary this year is particularly special, in that any babies born on the exact day we got married are currently taking their driver’s license test today. Also, we are now at the end of our first week of actually living in our house in Alabama.

To be clear, we are not “settled in” yet. Instead, we are “settling in”.

While we are indeed cooking meals in our kitchen now and sleeping in our beds in our bedrooms which now have door handles that lock, there is no question that our home looks like we are on our way… to being classified as hoarders.

Despite our Alabama house being nearly identical in square footage, my wife and I are using this time to get rid of as much of our stuff as we can; to make our Alabama home tidier than our Tennessee home. Instead of having to go through the trouble of deciding where to put our belongings, the easiest choice is to just give it away.

Sometimes that means we give it to my parents or my sister. Other times, it means I drag the unnecessary items out in front of our house; which happens to be on a busy connecting street from one side of the town to the other.

A few days ago, our daughter started laughing as she announced, “Hey Daddy, there’s a man in our yard stealing something and putting it in his car!”

I responded, “Oh good! He’s hauling off the living room rug and the bathroom shelf!”

Like I mentioned before, much of our inspiration in moving to Alabama is to live a “quieter life”. One of the ways we will be doing that is by having a living space that is without clutter.

As we are paring down our possessions each day, I am also looking less and less like a meerkat…

I managed to live through the entire process of finding a house to buy in Alabama, selling our house in Tennessee, renovating our home in Alabama, and packing up and moving to Tennessee- all without ever feeling one ounce of anxiety or stress.

Well, at least I didn’t experience anxiety or stress in my mind. But subconsciously, my body absorbed it all, in the form of a spreading rash.

Strangely enough, the unquenchable itch began around my eyes (now the meerkat reference makes more sense); then around my neck and down across my arms. No amount of aloe vera would give me relief.

At first, I thought it was because I started drinking a cup of beet juice in the morning once I moved to Alabama. But no matter what I ate or drank, or didn’t eat or drink, the rash continued to intensify.

At the end of the month that we lived with my parents, my mom told me, “I have a feeling once you move into your own space in your new house, that rash is going to go away.”

She wasn’t wrong.

After all, Enneagram 9s like me use repressed anger as an underlying fuel source; powered not by minds (head) or our emotions (heart) but by our bodies (gut).

So unknowingly, I literally wore my feelings on my sleeve?

To be sure, my wife and I hired DUCTS Air Duct Cleaning to professionally clean out all our vents in our Alabama house.

They sucked up a scary amount of sawdust, wooden debris, and lent that was trapped in our home’s ventilation tubes. This was not only from all the renovations we’ve been doing, but also from the nearly 3 decades of previous owners of this house.

As we have begun settling in this week, it quickly became apparent that our neighbors are amazing. The day we moved in, our next door neighbor had delivered flowers to us. The girl across the street baked cookies and brought them to us. And the couple behind our house reached to to us to let us know we are welcome to let our kids play in their yard, which more than doubles our own yard space.

We are noticing that the positive effects of living a quieter life are showing up in our kids. They are choosing to talk to each other and play together… on their own.

Granted, it’s themed around aggressive pillow fights in the living room, laced with obscure trash talking: “You don’t even know how to hatch!”

We are settling in. I like it.