Moving

We’re moving. 

It was an idea my husband and I had for a while, and then it was a plan, and then, suddenly, it’s happening. We sold our house. 

Last weekend we put it on the market, and thought, maybe it will sell in a week, two weeks, a month. It took three days. So many people signed up to see it, we had to pack up the dog and flee the premises. We hid out in an Airbnb in German Village, which is a lovely neighborhood south of downtown Columbus. We’d visited a million times but never stayed there before. Why would we? It’s twelve minutes away from where we live.  

The Airbnb house was in an alley, and every time we stepped out, to walk the dog, to visit a café or poke around our favorite 32-room bookstore, we got turned around somehow and had to use the GPS on our phones to find our way back. The dog and I kept stumbling. The streets are made out of 150-year-old bricks and the sidewalk slabs are kicked up by tree roots. 

Also, it was non-stop with the phones pinging, the realtor giving us updates about our house showings, the potential buyer comments, a bidding war brewing. 

Is this really happening, we said to each other. Are we really doing this? 

We GPS-ed our way out to pick up dinner. We sat at the bar to order something to go. The restaurant was busy with kids dressed up for prom and tourists in town for some important sports thing we hadn’t realized was going on. 

Let’s get a glass of wine while we wait for our food, we said. Let’s get an appetizer to share. The bartender was funny. Why don’t you just admit you’re going to eat here, he said. 

We ate there and talked about the past. Other times we moved, the search for houses and new schools for the kids. The time I had to find an OBGYN, fast, because I was four days away from having a baby. The night we spent on the floor in sleeping bags because the moving van hadn’t arrived yet with our furniture. We talked about the present. The packing up and the saying goodbye to friends. 

The future, and what comes next?  

All weekend I was reading a book. The story was about two families who lived in the same town in Ohio for forty years. It’s about other things too. Family secrets and betrayals. One person saying I’m sorry, and the other person saying, It’s easy to say you’re sorry, but it doesn’t change anything. 

But I was still stuck on the part where the families went on living in the same place for forty years. I don’t know what that feels like. The longest I’ve gone without moving is twelve years. Sometimes it was not my choice. But just as often, it was my idea. What makes us want to stay? What makes us itch to go?  

We didn’t use our phones on the way back to the Airbnb. The truth is you can’t get lost in German Village, even with all the zigzagging alleyways, the blur of brick and stone. Eventually, you always end up at the park or the sausage restaurant, and from there you can find your way anywhere. 

The realtor called and we accepted an offer and drove the twelve minutes home, to the house that in a few weeks will no longer be ours. 

This is scary, we said to each other. 

This is an adventure. 

Countdown

I am not a creative genius, but apparently 98 percent of the world’s five-year-olds are. I read this in a book. 

In the book it says they did a study. They tested the same five-year-olds a few years later and the creative-genius-ness had leaked out of half of them. By the time the group made it to adulthood, it was 2 percent. What happens during that time? Who knows. School and thinking you have to come up with the particular right answer? Social pressure and not wanting to stand out like a weirdo? Creative geniuses don’t care if they sound like weirdos. 

I was chatting about this with a preschool teacher who was visiting the library with her class of five-year-olds. The five-year-olds were skipping around shaking tambourines. They didn’t seem to care about coming up with the right answer or worrying if they looked like weirdos. The librarian had given me a tambourine to shake, and I shook it and felt like a weirdo. 

Why are so many five-year-olds creative geniuses? the preschool teacher asked me.  

They think outside of the box, I said. They don’t even know there is a box.

Meanwhile, I was feeling jittery. I can’t remember if I wrote about this, but my husband is making plans to retire. He has a countdown on his phone. The number at this moment is two months, 7 days, 7 hours, 13 minutes and 42 seconds. 

41 seconds. 38. 

35. 

Shh. Don’t tell anyone. He hasn’t told people at his work yet. Also, he might still change his mind. He is leaving his options open. 

I am keeping my options open too. It hit me that every decade of our lives, we have shaken things up. We moved to different states, tried out different houses and neighborhoods, had children, adopted pets. My husband has had a job with the same company for thirty-six years, but during that time, I’ve had multiple jobs. I was a high school English teacher, a PTA mom, a clerk at a children’s bookstore, an author who went on a book tour through California and spur of the moment, got a tattoo of a foot on my foot. 

I’ve never stayed at the same job for more than seven years. Unless you count motherhood and writing. Which, or course, I do. But listen, I have worked at my present library job for seven years. I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. 

The end of another decade is looming. The world is nutty. Some people I loved have passed on. The jittery feeling is telling me it’s time to make a change. Think outside of the box. Or, forget the box. 

I am not a creative genius, and I am a light-years-away from being a five-year-old, but standing here shaking my tambourine, I have a sudden desire to skip.

     

 

  

Nettled

Today is the day I am picking the stinging nettles and eating them. 

I am writing this now, so you can hold me to it. Although, already, I can feel myself slipping. The truth is I am afraid of the stinging nettles. I can’t remember what I was thinking planting them. Something I read in one of my herb books about how they’re chock full of nutrients? And after a cold dreary winter they’re often the first shoot of green in the garden? And something something about medicinal tea and helping with arthritis? Or the kidneys? I can’t remember. 

Three years ago, four, I bought an adorable nettles seedling at the farmers market and planted it in a pot in the back of the herb garden, but I haven’t touched it since. Except one time, I did brush against it, briefly, on my way toward something else, and it was like I was shot with a stun gun. Not that I have ever been shot with a stun gun, but I can imagine. 

I steered clear after that, but then, a couple of years ago, I actually ate a nettle salad at a farm my husband and I visited with our son and daughter-in-law way up in up-up-up state New York. The nettle salad was tasty, and I gushed about it to the farmer-host. But also, I had to ask the guy, How did you pick these without feeling like you were being shot with a stun gun?

I can’t remember what he said. Okay, I looked it up. You’re supposed to wear heavy gloves. You dunk the nettles in boiling water for one to two minutes. You immediately plunge them in ice cold water. Supposedly, this removes the sting. 

(nettles)

I am really going to do this now. 

But first, I am going to fortify myself with a second cup of coffee. While I’m drinking it, I want to tell you a story about how the other day a stranger came to the door wanting to give me a magazine. The magazine had something to do with aviation. I have seen this magazine before, stuffed inside my Little Free Library. Every few months, a new issue. I’d let it sit out there and after a while, I’d toss it in the recycle bin. How many pilots live in this neighborhood, is what I was thinking. 

Anyway, as it turns out, it isn’t a magazine for airline pilots. It’s a magazine for pilots of model airplanes. What the guy wanted to tell me was that he subscribed to the magazine and he loved it and he wanted to pass his joy on to other potential model aviation enthusiasts, so he’d been putting it in my Little Free Library and whenever he checked, the old issues had been snapped up. 

He was so excited, he wrote to the magazine, and they featured my little free library. Here, he said, and he gave me a copy to thank me for being a part of our neighborhood’s fledgling model aviation community. 

Did you tell him? My husband said, after I relayed the conversation. Meaning, did I tell the guy that there likely wasn’t another model aviation enthusiast in the neighborhood. It was just me, recycling the magazines without a glance. 

Oh my God no, I said, and a wave of guilt due to my callous disregard for other people’s passions crashed over me. 

I did it. 

I donned a long sleeve shirt and went outside with the gloves, and I glovingly grabbed the nettles. 

I dunked them in the boiling water for two minutes. I plunged them in ice cold water. My husband tossed them into our seafood gumbo dinner bowl, and we ate them.  

They were tasty, and now that I am chock full of nutrients, here’s something else I promise to do: The next time my neighbor leaves a copy of Model Aviation in my Little Free Library, I’ll leave it there. 

 

This Spring

A few nights ago, the dog was sick and I let her outside. She didn’t come back in, so I went out to look for her. It was 2:30 in the morning. I was in my bathrobe and roaming around the backyard until I found her. She was lying on her side in the grass. It was raining. She hates the rain. This is it, I thought. But it wasn’t it. 

I took her to the vet the next day, and after paying approximately ten million dollars, she was better. I sat with her on the couch and she did this thing where she lowers her head and pushes it against me and I kiss her ears and tell her I love her. Then she curled up next to me, and I read the book I was reading. 

The book is about two sisters who stop speaking to each other at the funeral of a third sister. The disagreement has something to do with a cake. For the rest of the book the sisters continue to not speak to each other. Each chapter is a story about a different family member, the sisters’ children and grandchildren. Story after story, and you know a little bit about everyone in the family, and you forget what happened at the beginning. Why did the sisters stop speaking to each other?  

I was savoring this book. The writing was lovely and funny and smart. I loved all of the people, even as annoying and ridiculous as they sometimes were. When I got to the end, I went back to the beginning and read the first chapter again—the funeral, the cake. 

I remembered why the sisters stopped speaking to each other, and I understood. Some things are unforgiveable, and even if you could forgive them, how do you forget? 

I took the dog for a slow walk where I let her sniff to her heart’s content while I searched for signs of trouble. Her back legs wobbling? Her poops a little smushier than normal? But there was nothing. It was like that terrible night in the rain had never happened. 

Except it did happen. 

When I was sitting with her in the vet’s office, she paced and cried and panted. We don’t always know with an old dog, the vet said. There are things we can try. Tests. Procedures. It’s up to you, she added. 

I knew what she was saying. How far was I willing to go to deny reality. 

All the way, I would’ve told you once, but I am no longer that person. Sometimes bad things happen that aren’t fixable. Sick pets. Families that splinter apart. Still, I paid the approximately ten million dollars and we did the tests and one small procedure. 

Back home and the dog is happy and the trees in our front yard have turned pink, turned white, turned green. The lettuce I planted weeks ago didn’t come up and didn’t come up and didn’t come up, but now suddenly, it's here. I don't know why I doubted it.  

In spring, spring comes. It’s one of the few things I know for sure. But today, that feels like a miracle.