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.