Vacation

The big house on the hill has roosters crossing the road, a pool, a lawn game set up to play on the lawn, and a bird room. The bird room is a room with bird-patterned wallpaper, windows looking out at the treetops, a pair of binoculars nearby in case you want to watch birds. 

I want to want to watch birds. I want to want to swim in the pool and play the lawn game. But I can’t shake this unsettled feeling. How did we get here? my husband and I keep saying to each other. We say it when we’re idling in the car, waiting for the roosters to cross the road. And later, when we’re playing the lawn game, and after, when we’re floating in the pool. He means how fancy the place is and how beautiful. 

I mean, no really, Where the hell are we?

The pool is heated. A nice touch. The people who own the house have invited our daughter and son-in-lawn to stay in the guest cottage while he does his stint as a chef at a nearby restaurant. Make yourselves at home, the people said. We ran into them on the road with the roosters and they said it to us too. 

Make yourselves at home. Meanwhile, we are living out of suitcases. There’s something I keep forgetting. 

Oh, right. I don’t have a home. We bought a house, but it won’t be ready for weeks. And what if the sale falls through? Every other day we are on the phone with our mortgage person Dianne with two N’s. Everything is looking great! she says, before asking us to explain every financial transaction we have ever made in our lives and then she wants us to upload another document. 

We upload the document. We leave the Airbnb where we have been staying and drive back up to the big house to see our daughter and son-in-law. We go for a walk along a stream and everyone gets ticks. They hop at us from all directions. 

They’re easy to pull off and flick away, but I can’t shake the feeling that they’re crawling on me. I slip on my reading glasses and do an inch-by-inch check. I dip back into the pool. When I get out, I can’t find my reading glasses. Never mind, they’re on my head.  

Let’s go out to eat, our daughter says. But how will we justify the expense to Dianne with two N’s? At dinner we make up a story about her, a meticulous mortgage broker just trying to do her job when she stumbles onto a seemingly mild-mannered couple who might be hiding something. The husband is cool under pressure. The wife is a loonytoons who catastrophizes about ticks. 

I have been watching too much Law & Order. The theme song dum dums into my dreams. I am not the kind of person, apparently, who can make myself at home when I have no home to go back to. 

But we have a home to go forward to, my husband reminds me. Anyway, we’re on vacation. 

This is mostly true. After dinner, we order dessert. Dianne with two N’s will be beside herself. But I think she will get over it. I’ll upload a picture. 

  

Comfort Zone

The horse trots up to the fence and suddenly flops down on his back. Is he having a stroke? This is the first thought that pops into my head. But then, he rolls around and pumps his legs like a puppy, before hopping back up and trotting away. What was that? I have no clue. I have no clue about a lot of things lately. 

In between house-selling and new-house-buying, my husband and I are hanging out with our daughter and son-in-law for a while at an Airbnb out in the country. A little town in Virginia where our son-in-law is working as a chef on the weekends. The Airbnb has a pond with loud frogs and horses that graze on a hill and sometimes flop around for the heck of it. 

What should we do today? When I was home, I had my routine. The same food each morning, coffee and a smoothie. A short walk with the dog. A shift of work at the library. Home and a walk around the neighborhood. Some writing. Dinner and another walk (I am big on the walks.) (I am big on my routine.)

But now everything is up in the air. 

The smoothie-maker is packed up who knows where. The library is far away. It’s actually not easy to walk around out here, unless you want to endlessly circle the perimeter of a buggy field. I can’t seem to find my stride. Last week when I was house-sitting for a friend, I couldn’t figure out how to work her TV. The only thing that seemed to want to come on was the show Law & Order. 

So I binge-watched Law & Order. It was weird how I kept falling into episode after episode. It’s a comfort thing, my daughter told me. 

A crime show? I said. How is that comfort? 

It’s called competency porn, she said. You like watching people who know what they’re doing. You like seeing problems get resolved in less than an hour. 

This is true. I don’t even have to give it my full attention. I can keep the show on in the background and know that everything is going to work out okay. At least one thing these days is for sure. 

Our daughter takes my husband and me to the local farmers' market. It’s like the one at home except we are in a field instead of on a city street. I am instantly at ease. I buy a coffee and a scone. I poke around the plants and the spring greens. The house we are hoping to buy is far away and in a place that is radically different from here, different from home. 

But what is home? A smoothie? A walk? A library? Not too long from now we’ll unpack the smoothie maker. Check out the local library, maybe volunteer. Walk a different landscape. Make a new routine. Today, though, I’ll eat another scone. 

Forget binge-watching crime shows and instead, carry a book and a blanket up to the fence where the horses graze. Watch as they wander and play. 

Between the Rings

The dog didn’t know it was our last walk through the neighborhood. She tried to stop at her familiar sniffing places, and now I wished I’d let her linger, sniff to her heart’s content, but I was already tugging her along. Toward home where we were all packed up. The various liquids you’re not allowed to load onto a moving van were loaded into our cars. Who knew we had so many liquids. Cleaning supplies and toiletries. Laundry detergent, lotions, cooking oils. I had a list running in my head. 

Clean out the fridge. Vacuum out the cabinets. Sweep the garage. Cut one last batch of lettuce from the garden. I forgot that one. Too many things to check off, and in the end, it was rush rush rush and no time to fiddle with lettuce. Also, I had come down with some kind of bacterial eye infection. For a few days I put off dealing with it, but then it got too gruesome. 

Hmm, the eye doctor said. What have you been up to lately? Any break in your usual routine?  

We’re moving, I told her. 

Well, that could do it. All that dust stirred up. She poked and prodded while I took a breath. Sitting in her office was the first fifteen-minute stretch of time in I don’t know how long where there was nothing to do but sit and blink away tears. 

And then it was right back to the ever-scrolling to-do list in my head. What happened was we made an offer on a house, but it won’t be ready for a month, so for now, we’re house hopping. Remember that nice image my friend Deb shared about being on a flying trapeze, how you have to let go of one ring before you can latch onto the next? 

Well, this is us now, fumbling in mid-air. A few days housesitting for a friend who’s out of town, a couple of weeks in an Airbnb, a visit with our daughter. 

An extended vacation! another friend said, excitedly, and I am trying to embrace that, but it’s not easy, as my husband and I unload the bins of various liquids from the cars, the multiple coolers, the bags of medicines, now including antibiotics and eyedrops, the multiple boxes of dog-related paraphernalia.

Cars emptied, and suddenly I find myself sitting again. After weeks of frenzied cleaning and packing, of a house closing and a house hunting, and more packing and more cleaning, of quitting the job that I loved, of going-away parties and goodbye lunches with friends, followed by more packing and—how much crap do we own and do I even care about any of this stuff?—

here I am, on Day One, between the flying trapeze rings. 

My friend’s house feels unfamiliar without her in it, her neighborhood lovely and strange. I’ve never walked around here before. In the morning the dog and I set out to explore. A new to-do list is building behind my eyes, but I blink it away. 

When the dog stops at a never-before-sniffed fire hydrant, I let us both linger.

 

House Cooling

We had a moving-away party. The idea was this would be a nice way to say goodbye to our Columbus friends. We’d have pizza on paper plates and drinks in plastic cups. We’d set ourselves up out in the backyard (because the house is full of boxes), and we’d urge people to take something with them when they left. A plant, books, garden supplies we’re trying to get rid of before the movers come. 

But it rained. Actually, it was the rainiest day I can remember in a long time. 

That morning I was roaming around the mostly boxed up house in despair. I had casually invited a lot of people. I had no idea how many of them might show up and how many pizzas should I order? Should we even be throwing a party in a house that we no longer technically own? 

Pivot, a friend told me, and move the party inside. 

Pivot is a big word with this friend. Okay, this friend is my daughter. It was her idea that we have the party. A House Cooling, Mom, she said. Get it? Like, the opposite of a House Warming. No one's going to judge the state of your house. They just want to get together one more time. You want that too, right? 

I wanted that. So I pivoted and drove out in the rain to the pizza place to put in the order. The order taker was a guy named Nick. Nick was excited when I said how many pizzas I wanted. He also talked me into chicken wings and salad. He’d supply the silverware, he said, and I’m so glad he said that because the idea had literally never entered my mind. 

When I offered him my credit card, he waved it away. Just pay when you pick it up, he said. I walked back out into the rain. I was thinking, I don’t have any kind of receipt for this order. I don’t even have Nick’s phone number. The reason I’d driven out in the first place was because I couldn’t figure out how to do an order like that online. And now, what did I have to show for all the food we might need for this party, but a guy named Nick saying he’d take care of it? 

I told my husband when I got back to our soon-to-be-not-home. He said, You’re going to have to trust him. I said, But you know how hard that is for me. 

Not trusting people is baked into my soul. I am working on this! But it’s hard when you grew up in a world where you learned, repeatedly, if you trust people, you’re a stupid idiot fool. 

Put it this way, my husband said, Nick also has to trust you. 

That seemed like a fair point. It kept raining. The dog was following me through the maze of boxes around the house and I was catching her anxiety wave and/or she was catching mine. What are we going to do with her during the party? my husband said. 

Another thought that had never entered my mind. It was thirty minutes before the party and our lovely neighbors said, Don’t worry about the dog. She can stay at our house. I wanted to hug them. 

Then my husband went to pick up the pizzas. He said the workers were high-fiving each other. He could hear Nick in the backroom going on about how great his team was for getting this stranger Jody’s pizza order all put together on time.

By now people were knocking on the door, closing up their umbrellas, kicking off their wet shoes. Somehow there was enough room inside and enough pizza. When the party was over and everyone left with the leftovers and books and plants, I couldn’t remember what all the stress was about. These were my friends, are my friends. 

I am so glad we had one last chance to say goodbye. 

Can I Live Here

The ferry was pulling in when we arrived in the town. The lake was very blue, the mountains on the other side, gray green. A family strolled by, eating ice cream cones. I was thinking, Can I live here? A fair question to ask because my husband and I are on a house hunting trip, and this is the place where we are planning to live. It was a long drive up. 

We had to break it into two days. In the morning we went to the title company office and closed on the house where we have been living, in a city where we lived for nineteen years. It was a funny feeling driving away, knowing that for the moment we are floating around in a no-permanent-address limbo space. 

It’s like you’re on a flying trapeze, my friend Deb said. She’s a head of a school and is about to retire (another limbo-y space) but first she has to give a send-off to her graduating seniors. She said, This is exciting. You’re flying along, about to let go of one ring before you can grab onto the next. 

I hope there’s a net, I said, and we both laughed. 

Our son and daughter-in-law live in this town, and we all took a walk along the lake. There’s the library. There’s the post office, the ice cream place, the old inn. I’ve visited several times and already knew the layout, but now I was looking at it through a different lens. Resident vs tourist. Can I live here? I was thinking about the first time we bought a house, how young we were and how clueless, scrabbling together a down payment, but possibly in over our heads. 

The day of the closing, we drove up to the house to do a walk through and I burst into tears. The lawn was overgrown since we’d last seen it. And we didn’t own a lawn mower! Oh my God, now we would have to buy a lawn mower! The realtor couple we were working with were very nice. The wife said, Let’s go to the closing and not worry about this right now. 

When it was over and we had signed all the thousands of papers, I was sick to my stomach. How much money we owed and could we really afford the monthly payments and how were we going to pay for a lawn mower on top of it all? The realtor drove us back the house, our house now, and her husband was out there in his suit, just finishing up mowing the lawn. I started crying again. 

Cut to many years and two kids later and we were a few days into another new house. It was Thanksgiving and the day was bleak and cold. The big tree in our new front yard had shed all of its leaves at once. We had no guests for the holiday. It was only the four of us, the kids, my husband in his new job, me with no job, all of us trying to figure out our way in this new place. 

I was looking out the big picture window at the yard, a pit growing in my stomach. Had we even unpacked the rakes yet? A low hum, and into the picture window frame, came a neighbor on his riding lawn mower, scooping up all the leaves.  

People are kind is what I am saying, in every time, in every place. But it is jarring, this moment in flight, the moving van packed up, the house you loved empty, your heart still holding on, the new house whirling toward you, but for now, unknown, uncaught. 

We take another turn around the little town, the ferry pulling in again, the lake so bright you have to blink. 

We can live here. 

Goodbye, Strangers

I read something online about how just a few minutes each day interacting with strangers can uplift your mood and make your overall quality of life better. The key point seems to be that sure, you may have quite a few lovely relationships with family, with good friends, but those one-minute conversations with strangers remind you that most people are generally kind, that we are all part of one community, and the world is not always a scary dark place. 

I want to believe this. I should. It’s what I experience every day at the library. What they don’t tell you is that eventually these people start to feel like friends and what happens when you move away and have to say goodbye to everyone? Which got me thinking: maybe I’ll just tiptoe out the door and not tell anyone. 

But word got out. Some of the kids scribbled cards. One of the cards was signed by the two little kids in the family and a name I didn’t recognize. It took me a minute to realize it was the nanny. Here I had been chatting with her for years and never knew. She hugged me. She said, who will give me book recommendations now? 

Write to me, I said, and I shared with her a final rec, The Correspondent. Then I went home and slumped on the couch with the dog and tried to gear myself up to keep packing. I don’t want to poke fun of my husband, but the other day someone asked us how things were going along with the packing, and he said, in a confident tone, “We’re about 80 percent done.”

I almost fell out of my chair. 

He said, What? 

I said, You’re forgetting all the stuff in the closets and the drawers and weirdo room in the basement with the sump pump. Plus, all the pictures hanging on the walls and the lamps and the three sets of dishes we have. Why do we have three sets of dishes? It’s crazy. Also, we own approximately two thousand glass jars, because remember at our old house when we had the freaky moth infestation that originated in the box of brown rice and we vowed never to bring food boxes into our home ever again and from then on transferred all of our non-perishable food into glass jars with tightly fitting lids?

Oh right, he said.

I heaved off the couch and spun around the room, building boxes to fill, tearing up my fingertips on the $^#&%^ tape dispenser. Pro tip on the packing: you can use soft items, like towels, sheets and your floofy sweaters to wrap your breakable things. I imagine this will be a fun surprise on the other end when we find our old DVD player wrapped in a bathmat and the china cups stuffed inside our socks and nestled in my bathrobe.  

But we’ll worry about that later. 

Meanwhile, I’ll keep saying goodbye to strangers. The mailman who jokes every afternoon about how much our dog loves him (this is a joke because the dog is barking like a maniac and the only thing keeping the mailman from certain death is a flimsy screen door and the fact that the dog is 90 years old in dog years). And the lady at the farmer’s market who each week sets aside a carrot cake flavored crescent roll for my husband (when we told her we were moving out of state, she wrote out the recipe for him). 

And the mom at the library who I met when the kids were four and two and newborn and now the older two are in school and the newborn is four and there’s another baby on the way. 

Friday the four-year old skipped up to my desk with a gift bag. Inside was a ceramic mug decorated with books, and I almost cried. 

How breakable this beautiful mug was and how carefully I’d need to pack it to carry it with me. 

Passing Through

We’re moving in four weeks but I planted lettuce. I planted lettuce because it’s spring and that’s what I do in spring and I need one thing to be normal. Also, I sowed spinach and weeded the flower beds and pruned the raspberry bushes. 

Listen, I want to tell the new owners, if you keep harvesting the lettuce and spinach, it’ll keep growing well into June. And just wait until all the raspberries start popping up. And I guess I should give them a word of advice about the toad that hangs out in the herb garden (he scares easily, so no sudden movements when you’re clipping back the oregano), and the multi-generational mourning dove family that nests on the back porch and frequents the bird bath. (They like that water to be clean, please.) 

I should make a list. How there’s a secret peony bush tucked behind the garage and a clover patch in the front yard where practically every other clover has four leaves. I’m not exaggerating. Look:

Meanwhile at the library where I work, I have been jotting down my daily tasks for the person who will take my place. When to clean the toys and tricks for hiding the scavenger hunt pieces and where the Youth Librarian keeps the special stash of glow-in-the-dark stickers. Oh, and the little seven-month-old who comes in every Monday with her grandparents? She will eye you suspiciously for five weeks but then suddenly, she will smile, and one day, when you’re across the room arranging a book display, she will give you a whole arm wave. 

Wait, said my husband. Why did you plant the lettuce, when we won’t be here to eat it? 

What can I say? Why prune the raspberry bushes or worry over the toad? Why do we do any of the things we do? Our last house we’d barely backed the moving truck out of the driveway and the new owners were hacking down the pine tree in the front yard. That tree held a hawks’ nest. You could see them sometimes, circling overhead, swooping and gliding, and who knows now where they’d land.  

But who am I to judge? When we bought our present house, we tore out the old owners’ koi pond. True, the filter was broken and the pond was mostly muck and rotting vegetation, but there were more koi than we realized darting around in the murk. I gave them away, but missed a few, scooped those into a bucket, and before I could find a home for them, they were gone. 

Snatched by a hawk, a birder friend said, when I confessed to her in tears. 

I left them out there like sitting ducks!

Hawks have to eat too, she reminded me. You gave them a gift. (This is the friend who I trust will always talk me down from a ledge.) 

Okay. But, but, but-- what if the new owners tear out the raspberries or forget to clean the bird bath or turf-grass over the four-leaf clover patch? 

(Jody. Meet ledge. Step down from it. Now.) 

My last Monday at the library, and I wave back at my little friend, and then it's home to a house I am just passing through, have always been passing through, 

on to plant something elsewhere, scattering seeds as I go.