Two Moves / One Goodbye 🦋

Goodbye, little home on the hill

The last few weeks of this month was about closing long-held chapters.

At the Salty Club, we ended our contract with our App hosting platform we’d had for about five years.

In El Salvador, our beloved little house on the hill, Casa de La Folie, got officially sold.

We spent two weeks in El Salvador, firstly so I could hustle my guts out alongside my CoFounder, Erika, to launch the new iteration of the Club.

And secondly so we could get all our furniture out of Folie, and officially, properly say goodbye.

There are so many similarities, though one is digital and one is in the real world. But when Erika and I were getting to know this new platform, where our videos would look now, how it would look to our new subscribers, it felt like moving home. Moving home, trying on the fly to decide where all the furniture and boxes would go, while making sure our hundreds of members liked their new home. Oh, and helping integrate the new addition to our team, who was incoming at the most intense time of our business in years. Which was kind of the point. But, a lot, all at once.

On the side of the house, Hugo and I were manually shifting a hostels-worth of furniture out of the house, into his pickup and to my friends house down the road. Majority of the days were twelve hours of pure work, whether hunched over a computer or hunched over furniture, dragging heavy gonacaste pieces up a hill.

We arrived at one am this morning back to Guatemala, after a five hour drive after two of the most intense weeks of work I’ve probably had in years. I don’t promote border crossings in the middle of the night with a child but by the time we realised it was way too late… we’d moved all our funtirute out of the house already and had nothing to sleep in. So we got going.

To say I’m exhausted is an understatement and my back is completely killing me. Lucky there’s an app for that. HAHAHAH. Anyway. But I wanted to write this while I’m exhausted. While it’s all fresh.

I met this house when I met Hugo. It’s been his love project for years, a part of his imprint and heartbeat, the house that holds our wild, stinky, surfer selves, the place we go to wake up with the sun, live treehouse style and get back to base. It wasn’t just a house but a component of ourselves, a pyshical representation of another compartment of our souls. That runs adjacent to the Antigua us, the suburban us, the school pick up and drop-offs and less-sweaty, more contained selves. And we love pulling Jago into that world too. To show him that there are many paces one can live at, many ways to live a life. Many ways to go through a day, work, do family, do community. He makes friends nearby and where in Antigua he’s running around under the trees with his friends, in El Salvador he’s barefoot and running around on the black sand. It’s not better, not worse, it’s just different.

Wall painting by juliepariisod

So much of this house was built by hand, and so many weekends revolved around trips to the hardware store, sanding, nailing, painting. It’s wild to look at a house knowing how much your hands played a part in making it exist (just look for the screws drilled in at a weird angle- that was probably me.0

So selling for sure raised some questions in us. We close the door on this house, is this the evolution of our lives, closing the door on this part of ourselves? A mega wise woman in my life once said to me, ‘don’t get too attached to bricks and mortar’ and that is absolutely true, and I’ve been reminding myself of this these past weeks. And, it’s ok to give homes the credit where credit is due. At this house, I lived alone for a year while Hugo lived in Guatemala. I put myself back together in this house, I learned to live alone and fall in love with my own company. I surfed twice a day, dealt with tarantulas and scorpions in my shower at night and bats in my room. In this house I developed my agency, my scrappiness, my get-it-done ness. I worked on Salty on my laptop, cause Salty has been a part of my chapter as soon as my Central America chapter began, now almost a decade ago.

I now realize, however my relationship with El Salvador has been over the years, from never wanting to return again to loving it so hard right in the marrow of my bones, El Sal is a part of me. And it always will be. We may rebuild again, just differently. Either way, this place lives under my ribs, the golden December sunsets over the rolling hills spilling into the sea- speaks to an essential part of me. It gets me. So even though we leave a house, El Sal comes with us. Wherever we go. And not just the country, but that home, specifically. That treehouse style home on the hill, with the view of the curling waves of La Bocana, the bats in the roof and the most gorgeous sunsets you’ve ever seen. We fell in love in that house. I saw the two lines on my pregnancy test for the first time, in that house.

At our second to last sunset, Jago Hugo and I made a toast to the house. We thanked it for holding us. For loving us. Jago thanked it for storing all his monster trucks, hahaha. I said “and now we let you go.” Jago and Hugo echoed me. And I felt it, slowly, start to unravel from my network of nerves, from my second self, the one where all your deep loves live, the ones you aren’t always fully aware of.

On the last night, yesterday, I put my hands on the wall of the bedroom that held my 26 year old self, where I slept for those first months where baby Jago started to bloom in my belly. And I let myself cry a bit and it felt so good.

We came back from El Salvador having let go of a home, and having let go of a structure that had held me for years, the old Salty Platform. And I realised how much our homes, our projects, our passions, walk alongside us and inform us, almost like our friends or our family. And it’s easy to sometimes reduce them to transactional things ‘my business’ or ‘my house.’ But they take up space in our lives and hopefully we pour our souls into them So when shifts or big changes, or chapter ends happen, the emotional impact can take us by surprise.

For everyone who stayed with us over the years, thank you for making Casa de La Folie such a special place. As I go through my photos to try pick out the best memories, there are seriously too many. Guests who became family, friends and family who flew so far to come. Wether you stayed for weeks or month, it became its own chapter and I have so many beautiful memories of surfing, cooking and just life-ing together. Thank you.

Now I’m going to go stretch out my back that is now locked up and curled over like a shrimp, on our new pretty app.