The Sadness of Having to Move
It was getting down to the wire. We were closing in five days, so I raced home between the kids’ football games to pack more boxes. That’s when I got the call from my brother-in-law, who is also our realtor and my right-hand man. He regretted to inform me that the owners of the rental we’d signed a lease on had decided to lower the price and sell instead. Psych.
Digging out my house-search list, I prepared for the groveling I was about to succumb to. We had no time for negotiation; I had to lock something in.
I really wanted to stay in denial about the task ahead and play outside with all the other locals frantically getting out into the yellow leaves before eight months of snow came a-knockin’. Instead, I spent every minute on the phone with realtors and driving my beat-up minivan from one rental to another. “Remember me? I’m the one with three boys and a dog. Will you have us? What? You’ll take us back but raise the rent by $150 a month? #@&! I’ll take it!”
The boys got into the house-hunting game, with Tucker the most dedicated, tugging at my sleeve to drag me in front of the “For Sale” signs littering the sidewalks and encouraging me to look up the listings when we got home to see the interior photos. Used to finding me in my office with my nose to the screen of Trulia, he plopped into my lap to ask if the house I was looking at could be a “rent to own” house. My six-year-old, talking real estate.
Then came the “what if” game. “What if we moved into an old ranch house with a creepy basement and no heat?” “What if we moved into a shabby one-bedroom condo in Aspen that cost far more than a single-family home in Basalt?” “What if we never found a home?” It was tough not having any answers.
I went back to the football field. Brevitt’s game had already started, and as my day would have it, Muki sneaked out and raced onto the field. She loves playing football with the boys and would make an outrageous quarterback. Depleted, I leaned against the car and announced to Axel and Tucker that I refused to move until the dog was caught and put back in the car. And so she was caught, mid-poop. Casually walking up to the football moms, I acted as if my world weren’t upside down.
The thing is, life doesn’t stop when you’re going through stressful times. It keeps going, and you have to truck along with it. With three birthdays tucked into the move, I baked cakes while packing. But as you already know, I’m infamous for baking delicious cakes that look like a pile of dung, so baking while distracted was no better. I couldn’t get Brevitt’s decadent chocolate cake from The Silver Palate Cookbook out of my beautiful Gothic cathedral tube pan. Don’t ask me what I did wrong. I buttered and floured, but the cake wanted to stay in Gothic central, so I frosted the half that came out, threw it in the freezer to be eaten for breakfast on Brev’s actual birthday and made about three more, just in case.
On top of that, a twelve-year-old boy brings other issues, so nudged between packing boxes were school meetings with Brevitt’s teachers. I sat there with box cuts all over my fingers and bits of cardboard nesting in my hair, wondering if they secretly blamed Brevitt’s distracting behavior on his wild and crazy mother. “Why is he so unfocused in class?” they asked. I didn’t know what to mention first: that he was a twelve-year-old boy in the middle of a move he didn’t fully understand, or that perhaps, just perhaps, the teachers weren’t equipped to deal with a fidgety, social, energetic boy. “Don’t worry, he’ll get better,” I promised. “Soon he’ll stop doing silly things like draping himself over the potter’s wheel in art class. He’s very goal-oriented,” I offered, hoping that would help.
Wade came home from work to find me comatose and lit a fire so I could lie in my favorite oversized rocker and watch the grass in the fields come alive in the onslaught of rain. He poured me a glass of red wine and sat next to me.
Looking around at the design of our house, with its echoes of my childhood weekend home in Vermont, I quietly said goodbye again, hating that it would soon be nothing but a memory, just like the Vermont house.
