A New House

We moved into a new house. The house is 575 miles away from our old house. It is different in at least 575 ways. Instead of being in a city neighborhood--the Starbucks with the never-ending drive thru line, the Wendy’s and the firehouse, the shop where you can buy five-dollar-a-piece gourmet donuts, or walk a few stores down and learn how to pot a cactus or browse used books or eat a chicken tikka paratha roll--

this house is nestled in the woods, 400 steps down to a lake. The nearest Starbucks is 45 minutes away. I don’t know yet where the firehouse is. I think it’s all volunteer. We are here in this place because we wanted to live closer to our son and daughter-in-law, and it’s not all that much farther from where our daughter and son-in-law live in DC, and because we wanted to shake our lives up a little, 

and because I had a secret dream to live in a house by a lake. Secret, because I never thought this could be a reality. But here we are.

When we visited the house a few months ago with our realtor, the second I walked in, I said, Oh, we can’t live here. This is a vacation house. If we lived here, it would be like we were on vacation every day. 

The realtor said, Is that a bad thing? 

Well. I mean, no? 

And then, before I could stop myself, I was doing it, picturing it. Living in an actual lake house. 

Cut to: here we are, second morning in the lake house. (The cut-to part was the six weeks part where we traveled around with our elderly anxious dog and lived out of our suitcases and glommed onto other people’s routines and traipsed around in a suburban neighborhood and a horsey farm in the Shenandoah Valley and the Cathedral Heights area of Washington DC.) 

I couldn’t sleep the first night in the house. The dark dark of the woods. The unfamiliar sounds. Is that a baby screaming? No, says my Merlin app. It’s a loon. A too hard mattress. (This house came with all of its furniture. Which is cool because our furniture won’t arrive for another week, but also, not cool, because what are we going to do with all of THIS furniture plus all of OUR furniture?) 

And the water is well water and it smells like sulfur. And the lower level has mice. And every time I open a drawer, I’m afraid of what I might find tucked away in inside. A bag of old pennies? Bath towels? Life jackets? Mice?! 

And we haven’t met many people around here yet, and I have that itchy feeling I had when I was eighteen and moving into my college dorm and everyone was unfamiliar and maybe they wouldn’t like me and how did I end up in this weird place miles from home? 

I stopped fighting being awake and got out of bed. My husband heard me from the couch in the living room (I know what you’re thinking: Why was he on the couch when you own ten beds? Why wasn’t he on the hard mattress with you? Long story short but the elderly dog won’t leave my side and double beds are too small for the three of us, and all of the beds are made up with mattress covers and sheets and blankets and comforters, 

as well as sprinkled with mouse dirt and bits of acorns and God knows what else, and we were too tired to wash everything and I ended up collapsing on the hard mattress and my husband ended up on the couch) But anyway,

he heard me get up, and we snuck out without waking the dog and walked the 400 steps down to the lake

and watched the sun come up. 

It was amazing. 

Morning

In the morning I tromp down to the community garden before the worst of the heat hits. Not even 8AM, and it’s already like an oven out here. How do people live in this kind of heat? Do you eventually get used to it? I work fast, weeding, watering, digging out what’s left of the lettuce. It’s still perky and green, but when I taste it, it’s bitter. Bolted from the heat. 

I am bolting in the heat, damp-haired and light-headed. Sweat dribbling down my face. My husband and I are in DC, longtime guests of our daughter and son-in-law, while the closing on our new house gets pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. But I am not complaining. We are with people we love and the people we love have a garden. 

Here is something fun about the garden: sunflowers, some so big that when you cut them and stick them into a jar, it all topples over. Also, bunnies. When I cart the dug-up lettuce over to the community compost bin, the bunnies are waiting for me. They don’t mind the bitter. The other day a friend died. 

The news came out of nowhere. Her daughter said she went to sleep and didn’t wake up and I can’t make sense of it. I mean, how do you make sense of it? 

Okay, I know it’s a thing that can happen. I just didn’t think it could happen to her, my friend. She was a fellow writer. Once, she finagled some kind of local TV show appearance for Ohio authors and I was one of the people she invited. I stood on the soundstage next to her holding my book and thought I might keel over from nervousness. But when I sneaked a peek at my friend, she was so cool, smiling like she was born to be on TV. 

Whenever she was in town, she stayed at my house. We'd walk the dog and talk about our kids, our writing, our gardens. The last time I saw her, a play she’d written was being performed downtown. It was about a woman our age who was empty nesting and worried about her elderly parents, so she and her husband decided to move in next door to them. 

The set was an elevator and the scenes changed to either be outside the elevator on the ground floor, the lobby, or upstairs where the penthouse apartments were. Or sometimes inside the elevator itself. The play was called Moving In, Moving Out, Moving On. At the end I was in tears.

Let me know when your next play is showing, I said. I’d love to come! But time went on and I never made it. In the garden I don’t know what to put in place of the lettuce. Sweet peppers? More flowers? The heat keeps rising. 

Something else about my friend. When she came for a visit, she always brought homemade treats and wine. I would cut flowers and put them in a jar beside the guestroom bed. 

In the morning we would drink coffee together on the porch like we had all the time in the world. 

Saturday in Washington DC

Everything has a fence around it. The Reflecting Pool, the White House. We’re in DC and it’s a million degrees, but my husband and I want to go downtown and walk around and see things for ourselves. Is the pool really pond-scummed or is it “patriotic blue”? How are they coming along with the renovations of the half-torn down White House? The answer to both of these questions is: We don’t know. 

All we see is fence. 

Also, soldiers. They seem nice but not thrilled with the million-degree heat either. We walk along the Reflecting Pool fence and try to see the Reflecting Pool. We walk around the White House fence and try to see the White House. There’s a larger perimeter around the building every time we visit DC. More soldiers. More fence. The park in front is walled off too. Through the fence you can see the lovely trees and the empty park benches. 

I can’t stop thinking about the news I heard in the uber car on the drive downtown. How the Supreme Court just took away protection for the 300,000 Haitians who have been living here, legally, for many years. Someone from the administration said, The door to America is closed. Go home.   

We go to a Turkish café and order mango lattes. We walk past the Ford theater and it's closed. We head over to the Mall, the area where all of the Smithsonian museums are, but we can’t get through because it's fenced off. 

There’s some fair going on. I’m so out of the loop, I didn't know about this. What fair? The Great American State Fair, my husband says. For the 250th Anniversary. We shuffle through security easily. Not much of a crowd. The longest line is for the Ferris wheel. Or you can visit booths made out of cardboard. Every booth highlights a different state. 

We visit Tennessee where they have a video of Elvis and pictures of the Smoky Mountains and country music stars. We visit Connecticut and there's nothing. That booth is connected to Maine and there's nothing there either. Wait, my husband says. Do Connecticut and Maine border each other?   

No, I say. We drop into Ohio and someone hands us a sticker. Back outside the cardboard, and music blares over a loudspeaker. The Rolling Stones. Is this American music? No. I try not to stare at the other people wandering around. Foreign tourists or Americans wearing MAGA gear. Everyone looks sweaty and bored. 

I want to say to them, We’re not like this! We can do better than this! Instead, we escape into the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and learn about the treaties our government made and broke. Which is to say, all of them. A film is playing about one of the many forced removals of Native Americans, a story about a little girl carrying her baby brother, knowing that if she lets him go, the soldiers will kill him. 

Well, that’s depressing, someone says as they stride past. The museum is air conditioned, so we stay inside for a long time, and then it’s time to go home. Well, not home, because we don’t have one at the moment but who am I to complain. 

We leave the fenced-off part of DC and return to the part where people live and work and garden and shop and walk their dogs. I wish that they could see it, the foreign tourists, the MAGA people, this part of the city, the country, 

this place with no fence. 

Afternoon at the Movies

We went to the movies in the middle of the afternoon. We ate popcorn for lunch and peanut M&M’s. The movie was about aliens and how they’ve always been here and if only we knew, we’d all stop what we are doing and feel awe and wonder. I want to believe this but I don’t. 

Sitting in that movie theater was the longest I’ve sat still in I don’t know how long. When it was over, my whole body was stiff and sore. I felt like a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader during training camp. This is the show we’ve been binge-watching with our daughter this week. Law & Order is old news. Now it’s girls leaping up into the air to ACDC’s Thunderstruck song and landing in splits on the hard football field turf. Just watching them makes my spine hurt. 

After the movie we went crazy and ate ice cream for dinner. We browsed fancy shops and at my daughter’s urging, my husband bought a shirt that was not “him” and I bought pants that are not “me.” The pants are brightly colored pajama material and they pool up around my feet. The minute I put them on, I laughed. These are not me, I said. 

But everyone was saying why not? What is me, anyway? We’re whirling on to the next chapter of the rest of our lives. Why not occasionally eat popcorn for lunch and ice cream for dinner? Why not wear clothes you would never wear? Why not try a high leg kick and land in a split?

Oh my God, Mom, do not do that, my daughter says. 

I used to be able to it, I tell her.

When?

Okay, it was eighth grade. I was a cheerleader at St. Joseph’s School in New Britain, Connecticut. Pretty much anyone who wanted to be on the team could be on the team. Except me, in seventh grade. I got cut. Probably because I froze up in the moment you were supposed to run and jump and do what they called a reindeer. I have literally forgotten this memory until right now, as I’m typing it. I was so humiliated, I practiced the reindeer in my bedroom for a year. I tried out again and did the reindeer like it was nothing. And then I kinda got bored with being a cheerleader.  

The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders are so beautiful, they’re unreal. Maybe they’re aliens. It’s possible I have been on vacation a little too long. I don my new pajama pants and head down to the community garden in our daughter’s neighborhood so I can work on her plot. Every day since we’ve been crashing at her apartment in DC, I’ve been weeding and watering, shuffling pots around, picking lettuce and radishes and sweet peas. 

On the walk back I stroll past the other plots. There are at least one hundred here, every small section some other gardener’s wildly different vision. Tomato plants and exotic tropical plants. Herbs and rose bushes. 

The pajama pants swish when I walk. I wander around the garden and pretend every plot is mine. Lavender poking its purple branches through the fence. Seven-foot-high sunflowers. A plant that looks like a trumpet. Or an alien. 

How could you not be filled with wonder and awe?

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.