Looking Back: The Emotions of Moving
(This is an older piece, but the feelings are still on target)
Seeing a moving truck hurtling down a neighborhood street used to make me think of new adventures: new houses with new rooms to explore, new gardens to plant, new roots to set down. But after spending six months selling my home of 17 years and buying another, I now see things differently. The experience is not all pleasant. In fact it is downright wrenching.
Houses become part of the family. They hold you and keep you warm and let you hide from the problems of the world. Yes, they throw you curves once in a while when the basement takes in water or the garage door refuses to open. But mostly, a house can become another child, someone you care for day to day. I would often say aloud when driving out of the driveway for a vacation or a long weekend: “Goodbye House, be good.” As in, resist some spark of electricity or broken toilet, whatever.
Because we decided to sell our house ourselves and not hire a realtor, I learned much about myself, about the things in the house that were precious to me, and about how strangers react to those things. I learned that I’ll never be a realtor! One perspective client was eager to have her three dogs sleep in the blue and white nursery that it took me months to wallpaper and prepare for my son’s birth. Another complained because my very clean home had a window sill in the kitchen that needed some touch-up painting. (I told myself she was reacting to the “super clean” house she had walked through. She’d decided to find SOMETHING to complain about.) Another prospective buyer, on seeing a photo of my husband so handsome and smoking a pipe, start to laug, “Who’s this? Hugh Hefner?” Ah well. I had to just keep smiling. I had to dissemble. I had to sell my house.
I also learned that I don’t ever want to be honored with a HOUSE WALK. I’ve had one every Sunday for the last two months. No fun–no fun at all to have people poking and peeking into your life.
And so as the days passed and the FOR SALE sign remained in the front yard and so did the routine of every weekend getting out the posters and sticking them in the ground at the corner of our block to entice drivers to stop by. And so, I was probably losing it. “Come on, House, ” I said aloud one morning. “I know it’s hard, but you have to let us go. You can’t fight us on this. The decision is made. I’ll miss you, I promise I will. But please give us a break.”
And so one family and then another made us an offer and after more phone calls and discussions, a contract was finally signed.
But elation was absent. I walked around my home, looking at my rooms, touching a curtain, straightening a bedspread, knowing it would be difficult to pack all our treasures. And our memories. After all, here we conceived two children. Here we read stories, tickled babies, kissed warm blonde heads. Here we gathered family, some of them now gone. Here, here, here–in this house where we have lived for so many years.
My friend Julie had moved a month before. “I had to leave the room during the closing,” she confessed. “I felt stupid crying about a house.”
And then one day everything got packed up. The moving van came. I again thought about those years of peaceful family living as I walked through one more time. I wished the same joy and peace for the new family. I wished that they would hear the mourning doves, smell the marigolds on the evening breeze, hear the neighbor’s dog back as a token of peace and security before drifting off to sleep.
Then we were in the car and going down the driveway for the last time. “Goodbye House, be good.”
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