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.