I can't find my sneakers

Or the Q-tips. The house is a maze of still-unpacked boxes. Books, mostly, because we have no built-in bookcases in this house. But also, bins of cooking supplies because we have a quarter of the kitchen cabinet space we used to have. The rolling pin. Muffin pans. The Insta-pot. Where do I store these?

For now, the dining room floor. The landing upstairs. The third bedroom--eventually, (hopefully!) my office-- is now a closet for extra furniture, pictures and Christmas ornaments, musical instruments, (why do we have three violas?) crates of my old manuscripts. I have more of these than I realized. I have more of everything than I realized. And here I thought we'd done such a good job purging.

Spoiler alert: we didn't. Apparently, when you lose 800 square feet of living space, you're going to end up with some clutter.

It's driving me nuts. For months, readying our house to sell, we lived in a pristine, monastery-like space. Now, at the snap of a finger, we've become candidates for the TV show Hoarders. 

And still figuring out the idiosyncrasies of a circa 1926 house. The dryer works! The air-conditioning vent in one of the bedrooms does not! There are no overhead lights in any of the bedrooms. Outside, a koi pond with we're not sure how many koi. An overgrown garden choked with weeds and... ugh is that bamboo?

But there's lovely glass on the front door. Rounded archways leading into the rooms. A front porch with a swing.

I sit here in the mornings to write, my dog at my feet. This is her first move, but already, she's settling in.

Move Moving Moved

One day to Moving Day and I am writing for the last time on my back porch. The house is mostly boxed up, except for the kitchen. That's my job for the day. I know the drill. How to pack. How to say goodbye to a house. 

But for now I am delaying it. Listening to the cicadas. Watching the tree branches bob in the breeze, the hammock we set out for the summer. We're leaving it behind.

The last house we lived in I walked the empty rooms one final time, snapped a picture of the kids' heights we'd marked on the kitchen wall. Another house, I said goodbye to a nursery never used. We moved before the baby came and we had to scramble to fix up a room in the new house. That house we left behind the curtains my mother made. A rose bush in the backyard.

This house we're leaving an herb garden. An asparagus patch. Silver knobs on the cabinets. A bookcase. The metal bar our son used to do chin ups. Iris bulbs. Blackberry bushes.

Yesterday I cleaned the bathrooms for the last time. The new owners were coming for a final walk through and I ran around the house cleaning and straightening. Why? my husband asked me. They've already bought the place.

For the same reason he was mowing the lawn. For the same reason I was out there with him, weeding the front flower beds. Because for one more day it's still our home. Because we love this place,

even when it's time to let it go.

Painting over cracks

this weekend, after a week of workmen tromping through the house, repairing drywall and measuring for new carpet, freaking out the dog.

She's not too thrilled about the painting either. So much disruption, moving around the furniture, the loud vacuum. Also, she's wary of the stepladder. I climb it with my paint brush, painting the same walls I painted twelve years ago when we first moved into this house. You really get to know a house, make it your own, when you paint it,

that close examination of the baseboards, the crawling around on the floors and reaching toward the ceilings. The kids were in school back then, jumping into the middle of a school year in a town where there aren't many new kids.

I'm listening to podcasts while I paint. Fresh Air interviews. A man who wrote a book about climate change and how our window to save the planet is closing. The emotional lives of primates, how chimpanzees have masculine societies and bonobos are led by females. We don't know what to make of that, says the interviewee, so scientists tend to focus more on chimpanzees.

There's a heap of dust behind our bed when my husband and I move it away from the wall. And ha! Now I know where all of my missing bookmarks have fallen, night after night, reading in bed. Our daughter's room has three layers of paint. The purple color I originally painted it--it was the first room I worked on-- trying to make her feel at home in our new home. A sunny day in October, her first day of school, I walked to pick her up (Walked!!! I had been so tired of the forty-minute car drives) She refused to talk to me about her day. Crawled into her bed and sobbed and what do you do to fix a pain like that, except to say,

You made it through. 

A few years later she asked me to paint her room a cheery blue. And when she went off to college, I turned it into my office, painted the walls what is called Sand 3, the same color I used in the house we lived in before this one. Like the iris bulbs from the previous garden replanted here, the lovely sand paint will move with us again.

This time I need my reading glasses to do the painstaking work around the trim. I listen to an interview about the Spanish American War. Paint the walls marred by the built-in bookcase, and did you know our government tricked the Philippines into thinking we would help them defeat the Spanish? More Filipinos died in that war than in the American Civil War.

The most tedious part of painting is the prep-work, the removal of light switch plates, the patching of nail holes left behind after taking down all of the pictures.

Only we know what hung on these walls, the graduation photos and family trips, a visit to the college my husband and I both graduated from, that time we took the kids to visit the place, the four of us smiling against a backdrop of ivy covered bricks, the children so young then. It was right before we uprooted them to move here, I think.

A podcast about the Russian hacking of our election. A discussion about what makes kids resilient. We'll be back at the same college in a few week to see our daughter graduate, the four of us together again.

A quick trip before moving on to the next house with new walls to paint.

Book boxing

Assignment:

Box up the books in my office.

The thought being that my husband can take down the built-in bookcase and I can freshen up the paint on the walls, making the room "pop" as our realtor likes to say.

I figured it would take me like, an hour to box up the books, and then I could tote the three or four boxes downstairs and stack them in the garage, a nice surprise for my husband, who's away on a weekend trip.

Flash forward three hours later and the boxes are stacked where I packed them (WAY too heavy for me to tote), on the floor in the office, which isn't exactly popping at the moment.

Also, it took seven big boxes to fit the books and I'm still not finished emptying the shelves. (note to self: Don't get side-tracked by the Marie-Kondo Does this bring me joy? question. Or I don't know. Maybe it is a good idea to ask that question. Already I'm thinking about how I am going to have to unpack these same boxes at some point in the near future. Do I really want and/or need all of these books?

And this is only one room. We have a built-in bookcase in the living room, bookcases in both of the kids' old bedrooms, a bookcase in the kitchen to hold all of my cookbooks and gardening books. Fun fact:

When I was growing up, I had only two small shelves of books.

The complete set of the original Trixie Belden series, 1 through 16, a handful of paperbacks I'd bought at Scholastic book fairs over the years back when you could buy a book for less than a dollar, one leather-bound volume (not sure where I got this) of America's Best Loved Poems, and

Linda Goodman's Love Signs.

When I was twelve years old it was my favorite book. I have no idea why, but for most of my middle school years I was obsessed with astrology, memorizing all of the signs and symbols, their respective characteristics, and the most suitable match-ups of the signs in both friendship and in love.

I mean, I'm a Cancer. It makes sense that I would want to know, what with Cancers being so sensitive and self-reflective.

Anyway, I remember reading and re-reading Linda Goodman's Love Signs, taking copious notes, building lists in a notebook of all of the people I knew and their signs, and analyzing how best to interact with them. For example, the boy I liked in middle school was a Sagittarius, a fire sign and clearly not a good match for Cancerian me (water).

Which turned out to be prophetically true (although I had to date that bozo for nine years to be completely and totally sure.)

Weirdly, Linda Goodman's Love Signs is the only book I took with me from home when I went 1250 miles away to college. I kept it on a small shelf in my dorm room, not believing in astrology anymore, but every once in a while, paging through it to look up a person's sign and see if he might be a good match, more out of habit than anything else. (Example, the boy I met senior year, a Capricorn (earth), was a much better choice for watery me, according to Linda Goodman, and I quote:

"you can see there are powerful magnetic forces pulling these two together from the start."

which also turned out to be prophetically true because reader, I married him, and now he's on his way home and I'm hefting boxes of books around in my office, thinking about how the only book I own from the first eighteen years of my life is this one,

before I slip it carefully into a box.

Moving Day, Part Two

The other day I hefted five boxes out of my son's room and mailed them to him in California.

Before I hefted the boxes out of the room, I thumbed through the things left behind--the books on the bookshelves, the plastic bag on the floor filled with lacrosse balls, the rumpled viola sheet music on the desk, the closet, now empty, except for a pair of old soccer cleats.

After I mailed the boxes, I came home and wandered around for a while feeling weepy and silly over feeling weepy because it's not like I didn't know my son was leaving. And anyway, he's happy and I'm happy for him and tra la la.

When my son was packing up the boxes a few weeks earlier, I didn't help him, except to offer garbage bags, in case he wanted to chuck anything in the trash, and a box for Goodwill, in case he wanted to donate anything to Goodwill. I told him he didn't have to make up his mind about anything if he didn't want to. If there was stuff he wasn't sure about, stuff he might want to hold onto, but didn't feel like packing, he could feel free to leave it at our house.

It's not like his room was going anywhere, I told him.

He said, okay.

Which made me wonder if the books left behind and the lacrosse balls and the viola sheet music and the soccer cleats fell into the category of stuff to hold onto for later. Or not.

It's hard to guess the things that matter to people, even people you know well.

When I was packing up the things in my own childhood bedroom a million years ago, I didn't feel a particular attachment to much of it.

I was going away to college 1250 miles away, flying there. So packing space was limited. What I was most worried about were clothes. I didn't have a lot, at least anything that felt fashionable (whatever that was). I'd gone to Catholic schools and had worn uniforms for most of my life. Also, I lived in Connecticut and owned a lot of winter-y related stuff and my college was in Memphis and I suspected I wouldn't need many sweaters and long sleeved blouses, the bulk of my meager wardrobe.

I left behind my long winter coat, the one my stepfather bought me when I was in ninth grade. I left behind my hefty feather pillow.

My stereo system. My albums. The much-played Van Halen and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and the Journey Escape record that I'd won at the county fair.

My two shelves of books, my prized collection of Trixie Belden books, the complete set of sixteen, the books an aunt had given me when I was a child, two or three a year, on birthdays and at Christmas, the books I'd read over and over, from number one Secret of the Mansion to number sixteen The Mystery of the Missing Heiress, the books that deposited me safely out of my childhood for a blessed few hours here and there.

The day before I flew away to Memphis, I hefted a trunk over to that same aunt's house. Inside the trunk were all of my journals and diaries, every story I'd ever written and two novel manuscripts, photos and mementos.

And then I left my childhood bedroom behind. My younger brother took the room when I went away to college. I gave him the key for the deadbolt lock that my boyfriend had installed on my bedroom door. Why, you might ask, did I need a deadbolt lock on my bedroom door?

Well.

Let's just say that after my sophomore year I never went home again except to visit. Somewhere along the way, all of the things I left behind in my childhood bedroom disappeared. The pillow. The albums. The books.

When I graduated from college, my aunt drove from Connecticut to Memphis to attend the ceremony. Inside the car she'd packed the trunk of my stories. She gave them to me, and then she surprised me by giving me the car too.

How do you even begin to express gratitude for gifts like these?

The other day my husband suggested we turn our son's room into a guest room.

Let's wait a little while, I said.

Moving Day

When you move to a new place, everything feels strange.

It takes a while to get your bearings. To find your way. Each time you walk out the front door, you have to think: How do I get where I want to go? 

A map helps. Where is the post office? The hair salon? The nearest grocery store? But a map can only take you so far. You may have to... gulp... introduce yourself to the next door neighbors. Ask strangers how the carpool line works at your kid's school. Who sells the best pizza. What night do we roll out the garbage bins. 

You knew all that in your old town. Ten years there and you had it all figured out. The short cuts to take during rush hour. The gas station where gas was 3 cents cheaper. The best park to hang out on Sunday afternoon with the kids. You were on auto-pilot in that place and it was nice.

Ah well. You know you'll figure it out in this new town too. As someone who's moved before, you know that leaving one world behind to settle in another, can be scary. But you can do it.

Anyway, it's not like you have a choice. Moves happen. You purposely seek a new place out. Or it seeks you out. Whether you see it coming or not, one day you may find yourself standing in your living room surrounded by moving boxes.

Just yesterday the carpet was covered with toys.

You were forever stepping on legos. Scooping up wooden blocks. Peering under the couch for microscopic polly pocket fashion accessories.

Your life was a baby crying in the middle of the night. Formula bottles and jars of mushy carrots. Diaper changes and pullups and potty accidents. Cartoons and sippy cups of chocolate milk. Endless chatter and tantrums and WHY WHY WHY.

Confession: sometimes you locked yourself in the bathroom to escape the whining and the noodle-y-os and the spit-up and the chewed up binkies. You dreamed of the day when you could stroll out of the house without a two ton diaper bag and a baby carrier.

But then you'd rally. Open the bathroom door and the day would go on. Scooby Doo and bath-times and story-times turned into homework and field trip forms and piano lessons. Carpools to soccer practices morphed into carpools to middle school dances.

Sleepovers. Birthday parties. Blaring music and screeching kids in the backseat of the mini van. Summer camp. College trips--

Until suddenly everything stopped.

The house wasn't for sale. But you realized you've moved. Everything is different in this place. You can't get your bearings. There is no map.

You wander around the quiet and stunningly clean rooms, not sure where you want to go, hoping you will find your way.