Moving Days

When insomniac during the period of selling our old house, working on selling our daughter's house, putting in a bid on this one and generally trying to make the ham and eggs come out even, I counted the number of moves we have made over the years- fifteen!

So, we are going to try the grand experiment of living in a family compound. What you see here is the main house where our daughter and her family will live. In back there is a funky three car garage with an apartment above it. That's ours!

The main house is lovely, a restored 1925 bungalow updated with a great kitchen, new energy efficient everythings, hardly any yard to take care of, and in an old fashioned neighborhood with neighbors who pop in to bring welcomes. (and tell all about the past owner.)

The so-called carriage house aka the funky garage is all potential. The contractors will begin in a couple of weeks to make it into a comfortable and even stylish two floor abode for us when we come to town a couple of days a week. I am certainly on board for all the actual facts of moving. We spent a day unpacking the kitchen stuff, horsing around and setting up furniture, taking everything out of the POD, breaking down boxes, and trying to find stuff.

The dogs were particularly irritating as they whined around being insecure and getting underfoot. Quincy, who's five, was delighted with it all and very excited to find that his beloved stuffed animals made it through a couple of months in the POD. He explained to me that Goldie, the stuffed goldfish had been o.k. because there was lots of fish food in the POD, but she was happy to get out. I can hardly think about the day when our own storage unit will appear. Surely no roach, let alone a stuffed fish would make it!

I am o.k. with the actual moving and I can imagine the process of gutting the garage and putting in a living space for us. Basically, I think this idea is a good one. I think of days when
Quincy will pop over for breakfast or we'll all eat dinner together on the future patio. I imagine my daughter and me walking our dogs down to the waterfront in the cool of the evening..

But for me, home is here on the edge of the Green Swamp. I fell in love with this place twenty years ago. It's terribly inconvenient, like having a lover in Argentina. Though I had the best work anyone could have, I craved those weekends, even before we built the house and all the other structures and we camped out with the bugs. I love the land and the space and the gardens and the privacy and the possibilities of the natural world. And now that I really live here, I can expand my horizon to include the local community and new friends and commitments. What could be more perfect than the long hours I spend making quilts and pots and paintings? Or walking up to the main house in the evening where my husband is finishing the dinner for us? Or having friends visit and we sit on the porch watching the birds?

We will have our own place in town and it fills me with the greatest pleasure and gratitude that our daughter truly wants us there and that we will go there and know that in that big house across the yard are people we dearly love. And I also know that as the years go by and we cannot manage our country lives, our small city place will be just right. Not yet, though.