Maybe living life on the edge is an acquired skill. Or maybe being a minimalist requires more than giving away a few things. Perhaps the first step for a budding minimalist, who desires to live on the edge, is to actually give away the stuff instead of putting it into another storage unit. I came to this epiphany when I thought my son was locked in the storage unit facility as he tried to find room for my box spring and mattress in the cramped 5X10 storage unit.

“Oh, he will be all right,” my cheerful daughter-in-law quipped after we had rushed out at the bewitching hour to move the cars before the gates locked. “We’ll toss him a sandwich over the fence.”

They live life on the edge.

This was the scenario I feared the most – a rush to get to the gate before it closed and then the dreaded impediment at the last minute, a box spring blocking the door. My stuff. My accumulation of worthless junk had caused my son to be stuck in a storage unit facility and there was no emergency number. But the two of them thought through the situation. Worst case scenario? We make him a sandwich. My daughter-in-law pointed out that the gate probably opened from the inside, because “think about how many times a week someone doesn’t get out in time. What manager wants to leave a comfortable home to open the gate?” My son was ready to test out his many hours of climbing practice by scaling the chain link fence.

These transitional moments, after I have taken all the steps toward a vagabond life and am about to shut the door on the storage unit containing my traditional life with my stuff, are the moments when I face that question: Am I ready to take risks in my life again? Once I am on that airplane headed for my next endeavor and my next unknown, my traditional life of being able to provide some immediate assistance to my family disappears. My life is packed up and stored away, but my mind continues to spiral through all the ways I might help my children with their projects or find a solution to everything cluttering up their lives. This happens each night as I contemplate ways to help. But the fact is that they will have to manage their own lives with or without my help.

Is it really my adult children I worry about? If I break it down into bullet points, each bold, black dot represents, not their inability to handle life without me, but my fear of being made redundant, or worse, forgotten. The reality of traveling so far away and for a long time without a set schedule is that I do become less of a factor in their daily lives. The other grandparents will mark the big occasions. They will make the oatmeal for my granddaughter. They will sing and dance with my grandson. My ex-lover will find someone new. Someone else will walk out the door of the townhouse I once occupied. I will be relegated to the “I wonder what ever happened to Kathleen” with my remaining friends. Leaving Portland somehow has the feeling of failure. I wonder if I will ever find my place in the world.

And just as I’ve given up all hope for my new life, my son emerges from the storage building. He punches my code into the gate keypad and it opens!

Perhaps it is a sign. Perhaps I’ll leave Portland exhilarated and looking forward to traveling light.

Sometimes having faith in the gate opening is enough incentive to live life on my edge — which probably does not include scaling mountains or visiting war zones. It might be the simple act of shutting the door on the storage unit without trepidation.

And if it doesn’t work out, someone will toss a sandwich over the fence for me.