We’re about halfway packed – my strategy is to do at least a couple of boxes every day – and about five weeks from the date of our departure (officially May 21st), and the house is starting to fill up with emptiness.
It’s hard, watching these rooms that I put together so carefully – and loved so much – get broken down. Dust from the endless boxes getting dragged up from the basement is settling into the cracks along the sideboards; all the photos are wrapped up in plastic; we’re eating meals off of the same four dishes every day, because they’re the only ones left that I haven’t packed. With each passing day, our house feels less like “our house,” and more like a place we’re staying in for the time being, before moving on to the next thing.
And not knowing what that “next thing” is – because we still don’t* – makes it harder to let go of what we do know.
There’s a tree in our yard that we planted a few months after we moved in; they were giving out little baby white pines at my grocery store, and I was so struck by how charming it was to suddenly be living in a place where trees get handed out in grocery stores (and also to be living in a place where I could go home and actually plant that tree in my own yard) that I ran home, got my husband and son and a gardening spade, and into the ground it went. The tree is bigger now; maybe a foot and a half tall, with tiny, bright-green little branches at the very top just starting to unfurl now that the warm weather is here.
I looked at that tree yesterday, and thought about how we planted it in that particular spot in our garden because there was nothing around it, and because I had this fantasy that decades from now it would be taller than the house, and we’d be able to hang a tire swing on it for our grandchildren to play on.
I knew we’d leave this house much sooner than that, of course; I knew we’d have to.
But still.
I want to take that tree with me wherever I go. It’s rooted here, and so I can’t…
But I just wish I could. That’s all.
*P.S. A quick house-search update, for those who are curious: over the weekend we put in a bid on another house, going in with a starting offer slightly over the asking price because there were no other bids on the house and that felt like a fair – even generous – offer, and learned the next day that the owners were upset by the offer because they had be expecting an offer of 100K over the asking price. They wanted one hundred thousand dollars over the price they had asked for. And this was something that we were supposed to know…psychically? So my suggestion to them would be a) “Try not to be horrified when people offer you more than what you asked for,” and b) “If you want more, maybe…ask for it. In the place where you ask. It’s called ‘the asking price.'”
Also I found a rental we really liked, and TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY PEOPLE had requested applications.
Two hundred. And fifty. People.
For a rental that had been on the market for less than a week.
Yaaag.
But hey: new houses come on the market every day, and I’m looking both at places to buy and places to rent. And if we don’t find anywhere that we love by the beginning of May, I have a month-to-month rental secured that has a pool in it, so there you go: happy summer ahead.
