The Tower - Rising from the Ruins of the Stronghold.

My last post has been nearly a year ago, I write this text navigating my way out of the rubble of Croatia. Left behind as a temporary home that served its purpose. It felt like several life-times condensed into 10months. A strange house, in a strange country, a temporal oddity. From the time we got there, we had the deterioriating health of Brownie at our hands, he arrived 15 years old here with us & passed +-8 months later at 16 years old in December.

Our home in Croatia turned out to be appropriate palliative station & rest stop on our journey into the unknown ever since having been kicked out of our old home in Luxembourg. We just chose quickly since with a Dog in Brownie's Condition there was no chance we would be able to travel around on a long winded search for something perfect. We had a date by which we had to be out of our old House and on our way into a new home.

IT felt impossible to get anything done there with all the time & energy Brownie required. The House just stagnated. A mosuito plague of biblical proportions kept us confined indoors during the height of the summer. Finally after already adopting 2 Puppies from a Rescue, we had a stray literally jump through on of our windows into our home, deciding to stay with us in October 2023.

We named the crazy fellow ''Kambo'', I initially took him to the local shelter, but they told me they could not take him in cause they were full & asked me to keep him a few days & bring him back later. I agreed, but when I came back they just ouright refused to take him in, because their shelter could only take in dogs from their commune & my village was not part of their contract. We then got him vaccinated and chipped & decided we would try to find him a new home ourselves then.

Kambo was untamed, albeit very affectionate, too much to handle for us, albeit also hard to keep him since we had too much on our hands already. December 26th Brownie passed after a night of having many seizures, where we had to wait until early morning to finally find him a vet that could put him out of his misery. The main reason we had stayed in the House was because of Brownie & we realized due to how there were some problems with our own dogs & kambo, that if we found him a new home, we would definitely just leave Croatia behind.

Late January we found someone in Berlin willing to take Kambo in, we hoped they would be able to pick him up, or meet me halfway, but I ended up Driving Kambo to his new forever-home in Berlin. He did an amazing 1200KM in the car with me without any issues & it was a pleasure to see him stay at a home of a person he immediately could open himself up to.

I drove back the same evening I had dropped him off, I did a few short naps in the car on the way back, arriving back in Croatia to @kaliphae, Kymia, Anubis & Kali.

We asked an acquaintance to do the sale of the property for us, we basically packed the few essentials we thought absolutely necessary into our old 1987 Renault Express, taking out the rear seat, to create a bigger storage area & space for the dogs. Just driving blindly out away from this place & out heading direction Italy. No idea what lies ahead of us. I can truly say that driving away from our Home there, felt like driving away from the Warzone, from the trenches of my life, the most challenging 10months of my life.

It was more terrifying than beautiful, although despite its terror there were glimmers of beauty sprinkled throughout. It was visceral, brutal, but it was also an honest mirror. A shocking mirror at times. Frightening. 10 months bathed in "Survival". A rollercoaster ride that felt to extend itself out into eternity as if it would never end. We had not left our old home rising from ashes, no Croatia proved to be the place where we we literally burned to ashes, hopefully now we may rise from them in a fire becoming phoenix.

And so I write this to you having left the ruins of the tower that kept us safe, until it did not but started crumbling on our heads, the lightening had struck, and the cliff upon which the tower was built was about to slip into the ocean. So we said our farewell to those ruins & drove off into the unknown. An absolutely fresh start.