The Good, the Bad, the Ugh

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I have now been in my new home for about six weeks. The first few weeks were strangely euphoric since I was so glad to have IT, the move, behind me. Our new house is filled with light thanks to double rows of windows in the living room and the weather was unseasonably warm. I got a cat, a good book, and didn’t make much progress on unpacking.

Then, I went back to Lawrence to visit my daughter. Actually I went back twice. I stayed in a hotel room, which was an odd feeling in an of itself, to be doing that in a place where I’d lived for 20 years. I had breakfast and lunch with friends and dinner with my daughter. Every waking hour was devoted to the life I’d once had and it felt like trying to break up with someone but still seeing them and not being sure it was a good idea to break up in the first place.

This week it all hit. I woke up Monday with a profound sense of dread. What now? The only way I know how to make friends is through work or through my kid. Maybe I could be a surrogate PTA President! A room mom! Teach Sunday School!

Yeah, when you start thinking like that you have to sit up and take stock. So that’s what I’m doing.  But tell me, how does a 60-year-old woman make friends in a place where she knows no one? This I plan to explore.

What I’ll miss: The view

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Deer

One Thanksgiving

The first time we saw this house, it was about two-thirds finished. It had an ordinary, just-like-every-other suburban-home front but we walked in and were greeted by a view out the back windows that was tree-house stunning. That’s because the house sits on a shallow, steep lot at what was then the northern edge of town, bordered on the north side by walnut trees and a creek. Every time we visited the house, we always looked OUT, never IN. A few days after we moved in, I thought, “You know, the rooms are kind of small!”

But the outside: trees, birds, deer, and yes a few pesky dirt bikers in some years I ran off with a witchy brandishing of a broom. The first few weeks in the house, it felt like we lived in a zoo. Then I realized it was the sound of peacocks, when one strutted into the yard.

There was sledding in snow on the hill, the sound of the creek when it rained, the cacophony of cicada in the summer, the suicidal splat of bugs against our windows at night so hard and constant it sounded like hail.

Our new place won’t be like this. Nothing else could be.

What Lies Behind and Ahead

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I am starting this blog at the suggestion of my dear friend Julie who thought I should document this period in my life. Why? I am within two weeks of leaving a house where I have lived for 11 years and a community which I have called home for total of 24 years. I just turned 60 and I am moving out of state, to a place I’ve only visited a few times? Did I also mention that it’s not Hawaii or Carmel but another town in the Midwest, a colder, flatter part of the Midwest?

The last two months I have lived pretty much by myself as I downsized three generations of possessions, sorted through photographs, letters and books, thrown away my so-called professional portfolio and had the requisite garage sale with strangers pawing through my mother’s linens. What did Heraclitus say — that the only thing that endures is change?

My sister referred to our past as a “vagabond life.” Yes indeed it was. So both of us stayed put as much as we could once we became adults and yet now I am headed on. I am fortunate that this is a choice, not forced on me, and I don’t have a smidgen of self-pity about it. But will I be able to start over?

That is the question.