Anyone who has walked around Fairfield Hills in recent months may have seen a bright pink truck drive past them, with the words “Nothin’ But Love” on its sides.

Upon closer look, one would see dozens of names on the vehicle’s front, back, and sides. Each name, written in bright red, is another person’s loved one.

The driver is Alison Miller, who has briefly lived in Newtown and loves spending time around the Fairfield Hills area. Miller is no stranger to traveling, however. She spent nearly four years exploring the country with her beloved husband, Chuck Dearing.

In an attempt to “get out of the rat race,” Miller and Dearing in 2009 sold nearly everything they owned. After selling their New Jersey home and most of their belongings, the couple set out on the road and started traveling.

The initial plan, Miller said, was to go “state shopping” for a new place to retire to. They even put a few things in storage to help them enter retirement.

Instead, they found a new home on the road.

“Just a couple months in, we realized we were having so much fun,” Miller explained. “We just said, ‘Well, let’s just keep driving.’ And so we kept driving.”

From there, the couple Dearing spent their days traveling the country. They stayed at military bases and inexpensive hotels, explored countless national parks, and, being self-admitted history nerds, dove headfirst into the history of the United States.

The couple was in charge of their schedule and could go wherever they wanted. Miller called it “the most freeing thing in the world.”

Then, after nearly four years on the road, Dearing got cancer.

Miller said he got cancer once before around 2010, during their many years of traveling. Dearing went through six surgeries to remove it, and thought everything was going to be okay. His odds looked good. He and Miller traveled in between every surgery and checkup.

But Dearing’s cancer returned in 2013, when they were around southern California. Miller had enough time to get him into hospice and call their three children, so they could all come out and be with him.

Dearing told her, “Don’t mourn for me in black; that’s not your color. Wear pink.”

“So I told him before he died that I was going to continue traveling, that I was going to paint my car pink so he could find me out on the road,” Miller said. “And he said he’d be looking for me.”

Living With Grief

Dearing died a few weeks later. They were together for 24 years. In that immediate aftermath, Miller said she “didn’t know what else to do.” They did not have a house and had been mobile for nearly four years. Miller, who worked in hospice care and bereavement support, knew how isolating grief can be.

Even though she wanted to find a place to live, close the door, and hide under the covers, Miller knew that would be the worst thing for her.

“So I thought, ‘OK, my car is pink. If I get out there on the road, then I’ll bring people to me,’” Miller explained. “I won’t have the chance to isolate. I’ll be in new situations every day, talking to new people. Nothing will be the same.”

Miller talked to her kids about it. Her daughter, Rachael-Grace Sands, told her about a little trailer called a T@b Teardrop.

She was in Connecticut, where one of her sons was at the time, and went to the coast where they were selling the trailers. Miller spotted a medium-sized trailer, one just enough tall to stand in.

Dearing had once suggested they buy a trailer during their travels, but Miller turned him down. Now, all these years later, she bought that T@b Teardrop trailer on the spot.

Miller even had a color of pink created for her car when she was in Arizona. She told the man working on it about her and Dearing’s love story, and he named the color Chuck’s Watchin’ Over Me pink.

“This way,” the man told her, “Chuck will be around you as you travel.”

“It was the perfect, perfect shade,” Miller said.

After a night at the campground across the street, where Miller learned about RPMs and how to drive — and brake — with a trailer, she set out on the road. One of her sons, Nick, initially traveled with her to make sure she knew what she was doing.

Sands, who also spoke with The Newtown Bee about her mother’s journey, said she and her brothers had a lot of feelings about their mom being so newly widowed and towing a trailer for the first time by herself. This led Sands to talk with her now ex-husband and tell him how she wanted to spend some time with her mom on the road.

He was super supportive, and Sands called her mom with a proposition: “What do you think about me going on the road with you for six months?”

Miller originally heard “six weeks” and not six months, so when Sands clarified herself, she was completely taken aback. Sands mentioned she talked with her brothers about it, and felt it would be good for both her and Miller.

“I wanted to just be there for support, just help her figure all this new life out,” Sands explained. “I had a conversation with dad before he died, and he said ‘make sure to look after your mom.’ And that was a given anyway, but it was a way for me to fulfill that wish of his.”

When Miller agreed, she and Sands put together a travel plan. They packed up, threw a big going away party at Sands’s old yoga studio, and left around late May 2014.

On The Road Again

The mother-daughter duo had a general idea of where they wanted to go, but Sands said they mostly just flew by the seat of their pants. They first headed west to California, went up along the coast into Washington, and traveled across the Dakotas.

Together, they honored a request Dearing had before he died. He asked Miller to return to four places they previously visited and scatter his cremains: Crater Lake, Oregon; Chief Crazy Horse Carving, South Dakota; Little Big Horn, Montana; and Fort Jefferson in Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida.

Miller said she was grateful to have her daughter by her side. Sands helped Miller navigate through life without Dearing and the emotional aspects of decision making, even through their shared grief.

They traveled together for six months before Miller dropped Sands off at home. Miller headed back out onto the road “cold turkey, without any real direction,” she said.

“I just know that, as I was driving along, because everything was pink, it started attracting people to me,” Miller said.

Sands said many people assumed the pink presentation was some sort of breast cancer awareness, so when they heard Miller’s story, they were touched. Miller chronicled her adventures with Dearing on her blog, originally called Happily Homeless. She later rebranded it under a new name, Odyssey of Love.

She wrote for no other reason than doing so helped her fight against grief and isolation, she said. Miller decided somewhere along the way that her Odyssey of Love was not just her and Dearing’s love story, but it was also about other people’s love stories.

“And then I realized it wasn’t just about love stories between couples, it was also a love story about relationships,” Miller said.

She started inviting people who followed her blog, or if she met them out on the road, to write their loved one’s name on her trailer. People could also send Miller their loved one’s name and have her write it on the trailer for them.

Miller said she always carried little red pens with her, so that whoever wanted to sign a name could. Her trailer, dubbed Pink Magic, would carry on their memory.

“And even if people didn’t know whose names they were reading, they would say their names. And it just blossomed into this beautiful experience for me,” Miller said.

She would meet people at rest stops, gas stations, camps — everywhere. Even as she drove down the road, people would give little thumbs up or make hearts with their hands. Miller, who said she always drove in the slow lane, realized people would sometimes ride her bumper for minutes at a time to read the names and go on her website.

“There were times I looked through my side mirrors, see the names on my trailer, and I’d be almost shocked there wasn’t light just radiating out of it. Because all of those names, all of that love, traveled right along with me,” Miller said.

She called the names a “beautiful responsibility” that she carried, and was happy to honor so many people on her truck and trailer. Miller eventually started work camping, seasonal jobs taken on by full-time travelers on the road, and also at a renaissance fair in Arizona.

Through these experiences, and her continued travels, Miller said she found her voice again — something she lost after Dearing died.

Blooming Forward

When the pandemic hit, her son in Newtown learned he would to be deployed and asked Miller to support his wife. Miller stayed with her daughter-in-law for nine months until he returned.

Sands got a divorce around the same time, and she and Miller got a little apartment in Ansonia. By this point, Miller felt she did whatever traveling she needed to do.

“I spent almost four years on the road between me and Dearing, and about a decade more on my own. I did whatever it was that I needed to do, but I wasn’t sure what to do with my trailer,” Miller said.

She briefly considered selling it, but Sands immediately protested. To them, Pink Magic became more than a trailer, but a living history about everything: widowhood, adventure, grief, community, and so much more.

Miller ultimately gave it to Sands, who will use it for her new business, Thistle & Grace Florals. She is turning Pink Magic into a “flower trailer,” she said, taking it around for events, weddings, and everything in between.

Pink Magic, under its new name, Thistle, will follow through in Thistle & Grace Florals’ message: Love Blooms Forward.

“[The goal] is to continue building community around these stories of love, but through the medium of flowers,” Sands explained.

Thistle is currently in its “rehab process” after sitting unused for several years. After its interior and exterior work is done, Sands is going to find the perfect picture of her dad to put inside.

Thistle will make its grand debut at Newtown Arts Festival on Friday, September 26.

Sands is putting together a small book that people will be able to browse through, to see what Thistle was before becoming a flower truck.

To Miller and Sands, Odyssey of Love is not the story about how Dearing died; it is the legacy of love he left behind.

“Dearing has been dead for, God, it seems like centuries at this point, but the love is so strong. I don’t really feel him around me, I’d love to see the signs … but I don’t. But, I know that he left so much love behind, and I do believe in that,” Miller said.

After she left camp for the last time in 2019, Miller decided it was time to make a documentary about her journey. Only one problem: she had no idea how to make one.

She eventually got in touch with directors Emily Jean Thomas and Blake Hemmel, who heard her story and did everything they could to make it come to life. The documentary, released in 2021, features stories from immediate family, footage of Miller traveling through Zion National Park in Utah, and testimonies from the many people touched by Odyssey of Love.

From Pink Magic to Thistle, Miller said love itself endlessly blooms forward.

“Love is as necessary to any of us as breathing is. Whatever kind of love it is ... hold onto it,” Miller said.

To learn more about Alison Miller's story, visit anodysseyoflove.com.

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Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.