The Last Bit

Our Penske truck loomed outside our house, parked illegally on the street by our red front gate.  Its back end gaped open.  I wasn't sure that we'd fill it, and I certainly wasn't sure we'd fill it in time.  We had to move everything that remained out of the house, which was, despite our sale and numerous ruthless clean-outs, still significant.  Then we had to clean--after moving into a series of dirty houses, I was determined to leave the house sparkling.  And we were a day behind schedule.  Our hotels were booked from Chicago to Montana, and there was no going back.

It was hot.  If you live east, close your eyes and remember July.  Got it?  Feel the sweat trickling down your back?

Martin was at the U, anxiously twiddling his thumbs while an IT guy wiped his computer clean, and I had snuck out to eat lunch down-town with friends.  Lunches with friends had become funny things of late.  Back when all looked clear for the next twenty years or so (our kids would go to school together, possibly but not probably fall in love, and we'd grow old in the long Pennsylvania summers), we'd chat easily about the endless details that sharing daily life affords.  But now, with the house in a constant state of upheaval and an impending move in the air, easy chat, though we tried for it, felt like a sailboat perched in denial on a rolling, stormy sea.  On board we were still toasting each other and eating finger food but we knew the storm, and the tossing overboard, and the ending-up-on-different-islands, was imminent.

All the same our lunch was good and we browsed through the Artisan's Shop afterward, just as if there was nothing pressing to do--no empty moving van, no house to empty and clean.

By three o'clock, the moving truck still looked mostly empty.  The reality of staying up most, if not all, of the night, seemed closer and closer when, around four o'clock, our community began trickling in the door in earnest.  Soon the house was full to bursting with people moving furniture, brandishing brooms and huffing down stairs with boxes.  And before you knew it, seven o'clock rolled around and there was only detritus left behind, a few wisps of us in the corners of echoing rooms, empty mantels and cupboards and drawers.

We sat on the floor in the kitchen and popped the cork from some champagne I'd been saving since my birthday, and then we filled plastic cups and stared at each other.  I raised my cup and bungled a toast:  "To the best friends a person could have," I said, and we drank up.  The children I'd known since they were in strollers, one since birth, tore around the empty rooms in the tricycle and little car I'd left out until the last minute.

Martin raised his cup:  "When we first moved here," he began (oh!  An articulate toast!  Bully for him), "Next to the coal mine, when the black dust covered our windowsills, I said, 'We'll give it one or two years, tops, and then we'll be out of here.'  But soon that year turned into a plan to stay for twenty years, and we were happy about it.  We have all of you to thank for that.  Of course now our plans have changed again, but we love you all and thank you for being part of our lives."

At this point I whipped out the tequila and we finished that off--but there wasn't that much left after all--and I began to feel the reality of what was happening sink in just a bit.  That's what happens when you sit down at the end of a day--you can go, go, go, but then when you stop, what's real is still waiting for you.  And what was really waiting for us now was goodbyes.

Sally had asked us to cry just once before we left, and it turns out that wasn't hard at all.  But as grief can so easily slip into sentimentality, let me skip to the next morning, on our way out of town.

Perched high on the seat of that Penske truck, we surveyed the mess the raccoon had left in front of our house.  We'd just watched the garbage collectors take the twelve or so enormous bags of garbage that stretched from one fence post to the next but they had not deigned to scoop up the disgusting trail of raccoon leftovers. 

We never had caught the raccoon--I called him Rocky--who intermittently disturbed our garbage and whom, one day, I'd seen meandering thorough the garden, apparently shooting the breeze with our well-fed groundhog.  We'd generally opted for a "live-and-let-live" philosophy with the considerable wildlife that kept Wazoo buzzing along, and now Rocky Raccoon had enjoyed the last laugh.

By this time, too much crying had rendered a splitting headache, so every time I bent over to pick up another used, chewed bathroom item, my head felt as if it were going to explode.  But finally the front lawn was clean and Martin turned the key and the Penske shuddered to life.  We pulled away from our curb and left town far behind, sped past the sheep grazing on the hill bisected by a new gas pipeline, looped through the densely forested roads up to a ridge, past familiar farms.  Finally the road spat us onto the Interstate and we were well and truly on our way west.

I shared a generous squirt of hand sanitizer with Martin.  We rubbed our palms hard to free ourselves from raccoon and garbage.  "Somehow that seemed appropriate," I reflected.  Our last act in our beloved, imperfect home had been cleaning up biohazard trash from our front yard.  It wasn't a stylish exit, but it was perfect for us, an act of service to the critters who will live on in our garden long after we settled somewhere else far away. 

And we aren't stylish people, either--we live as fully as we can, love people with as much energy as we can muster, and collect in the warmth and comfort grace and love brings to us.  In the end, we were filled with thanksgiving, more than we could express fully to those who deserved it, and who could have asked for more than that?

And so the miles fell behind us and the tight hills of Pennsylvania unwound into plains, and the plains broke into buttes.  Four days and thousands of miles later, a scrabbly desert burst into mountains.  But that's another story.