We’d made no plans for the Northeast. When we set out back in February, our goal was to hunt out corners of the country we’d never seen. Places we thought might make a good home. We aimed to let our curiosity lead us around the continent, and while the old colonies are beautiful in their own right, neither of us had much interest in spending our time jousting with crowds or tracing roads we’d run before.

We didn’t finish everything. Some paint and siding left undone. A small porch. The big items—finishing out a store room, contending with some water damage, and tiling a floor—took longer than I reckoned, and by the time I looked up from the last task at hand, we’d been in Virginia for a little more than a month. One month out of this year’s precious 12.

I’d been hunting a KTM since I sold my 950 Adventure in preparation for our departure. The XR400 I’d bought to balm that burn had done little but infuriate me in the interim. Carb issues. Fork seal issues. General old bike issues, ones that would be a cinch to solve with a comfortable garage and a few good beers, turned into an outright aggravation.

I must have been 12 years old, sitting in the back of the bus, waiting for the long line of yellow Blue Birds to make their way to the high school to pick up the older kids. It was early May. Every other window was down, the warm afternoon air whispering promises of the summer to come. That’s when The Noise came. The unholy wail of a Honda V4 in a mad reach for its redline. Not barking so much as screaming. Frothing through two unpacked, megaphone exhausts in a desperate and very real attempt to crack open the empty sky above.

I worked construction through college. Four years' worth of summers and breaks swinging hammers and trying to get back to school with all my digits attached. I can’t drive 10 minutes in this county without pointing at a house I put hands to. Gorgeous things that employed a minor army of craftsmen, timber framers and stonemasons shaping material by blows in the front yard. Electricians and plumbers up to their elbows in the bones of the thing. Laborers and carpenters doing anything but stitching together a generic box. Painters and cabinet makers and tile men dressing it all at the end.

Beth was seven months pregnant when we found out we couldn’t get the cash to finish the house. There was no kitchen. There wasn’t even a room where the kitchen should have been, just bare stud walls and exposed, diagonal-plank subfloor that gave us a great view of the basement below. A pleasant November draft came singing its way up from the darkness every time we walked by. We were reduced to cooking out of a hand-me-down toaster oven and an electric skillet I’d had since college.

We’ve spent our Junes in Virginia. Blew a pile of them over the long decade since we packed up and said goodbye to family, and to the beautiful hills, to wander our way south in search of some kind of life. It’s the month we got twisted up together as kids—got engaged, got married. The month of the long, languid summer solstice, daylight hanging in the sky until well past nine, singing the sad truth that our days will only get shorter from here.

The fog is thick and comes sulking through the open garage doors sometime past midnight. The Virginia mist mixes with the murky early morning hours and the rot smell of gear oil on concrete. I’m in Fincastle, doing little more than wringing my hands while a friend-of-a-friend dissects the rear differential on the Dodge. We’re six hours into a nine-hour job.

I’d written off Knoxville. Put it out of my mind. We’d lived a comfortable eight years in that bright and beautiful southern city on the banks of the Tennessee River, and I couldn’t think of the place without it kindling a soreness in my chest—the tender old ache of homesickness. Familiar as breathing, these days. But you can’t ignore where you are.

The sun was a dim glow over the mesas outside of Grand Junction when we said goodbye to Brandon and Leigh. We loaded up. Four adults. A full 2,000 pounds of camper and propane and water on the tail. A heavy, galvanized U-Haul trailer and its cargo: Kevan’s fully-loaded, derelict Tacoma. If I wanted an exercise in using every ounce of capability the Dodge had to offer, I found it.