One big farm house packed to the gills
+ one moving van
+ small house at destination
(X astronomical gas prices)
=one huge moving sale

This was an equation even I, math-challenged as I am, could figure out.  Martin and I gave ourselves one week to fly back to Pennsylvania and (sans kids) unleash a fury of fixing, cleaning, selling, and packing on our big old Dutch Colonial.

When we walked in the doors, our home smelled the same, of herbs and sleep and rich old wood.  The stairs wound up to the second floor as they always had, and at the top, the childrens' beds were made, ready for their travel-weary bodies to slip between the sheets.  But they weren't with us, and Martin and I gazed at our house--everything clean, everything in its place--and thought of the work that lay before us.  We gazed up at our ceilings where the electrician had rewired the house in our absence, and big holes in the plaster gaped back at us.

The very next day we dismantled the childrens' rooms.  Then we plunged onto the rest of the house.  That week felt like a dream, punctuated by sweet breaks with friends, a last dinner at our favorite sushi restaurant and a midnight trip to Walmart to collect packing boxes.  I realized that the west had already made me soft; the massive, dirty trucks that have clogged the county's streets since the gas boom and the poverty that marks the hilly, green county that we grew to love so well shocked me again.  The houses of my friends and our garden, nearing the peak of summer color, spoke of home but didn't quite feel like home.

Early in the week Sally dropped into our house, a mess of cardboard boxes and plaster dust, and before she left she said, "I want to see you people cry just once before you leave."

Of course we'd grieved plenty by this time, but as a veteran mover--I've moved sixteen or more times now--I know you can't pack up a house and cry at the same time.  You have to be able to see the teacup you're wrapping, damn it.  You pack like crazy and then you leave yourself a little space to let the transition sink in before you jump into the next world--a couple hours at the end to say goodbye, goodbye to the house and your friends and all the goodness that has surrounded you like a choir of voices.  But the packing and the moving is hard work and you have to be wiry and go back to your peasant roots and show a little sisu, as my muscular Finnish ancestors would say.

My parents call this in-between space--and so I've come to think of it--"the wood between the worlds."  You Narnia buffs, you know what I'm describing; in The Magician's Nephew, Digory and Polly slip the evil uncle's rings on their fingers and find themselves splashing up through a shallow pond into a forest.  The world--which has a series of ponds, or pools, is comforting in a way--it makes you a bit sleepy and complacent, but there's a feeling of discomfort, too, as if you're not quite anywhere specific, but in a waiting place.  You're neither here or there but somewhere else all together.  Digory and Polly must plunge into another pool to access the next world, full of adventures (frightening or pleasant). 

I have been in dozens of woods between worlds, and the feeling is one of waiting, caught up in suspense between one reality and the next.  It always feels as if I'm dreaming (almost jetlagged) and if I have to wait too long in the wood between, I begin to feel lost and frustrated.  So I take a breath, grope toward the next pool, hold my nose, and plunge in.

In our wood between the worlds, we had to cut all our belongings in half or more.   We'd done much of that already; we'd excised about 2/3 of our books, clothes, toys, and miscellany.  The furniture had to be rooted through, our beloved old pick-up sold, and our house still felt as if it were at capacity.  Ah, sigh.  I began to think it would be a relief if the house burned to the ground.  We'd book a flight back and arrive completely unencumbered.

And that was a pretty good rule of thumb, in the end.  If the house burned down, what would we miss?  The answer was, not much.  We tried to marry that somewhat reckless rule with the check of practicality (don't burn the mattresses; they are too expensive to replace), and then we began pricing the house.  Soon the entire first floor, the porch, and the driveway were jammed with things we no longer wanted.  Too much stuff had become a price to pay for freedom, for the wind at our backs and our feet shaken free of the wretched dust (the untimely, sad end to a job) that still clung to our feet. 

Now we only needed to sell it all, and that I dreaded more than anything, not because I didn't want to see it go, but because selling my own stuff makes me skin-crawlingly uncomfortable.  (Once we listed a couch on Freecycle and when a family came to pick it up, I made the children hide with me under a table so we wouldn't have to face them.  There was nothing wrong with the couch; it was a great giveaway.)  I just have a paralyzing sort of embarrassment about passing on my stuff.  Maybe it was growing up in developing countries.  Maybe I feel guilty about owning things.  Whatever it is, it made me hate the upcoming sale--which was necessary for our resettlement elsewhere--with a vengeance. 

In the end, I made it through by writing a running narrative on a shopping list pad while two hundred people or so tromped through our house.  I'll include the best bits in the next post.  

Thanks for rehashing it with me.  Soon we can all move west.