Time to Go

Years ago, my mother liked to tell the story about a teenage neighbor of ours who needed to give her handicapped mother quite a lot of help.  Once when her mother was learning to drive a specially equipped car, she instructed her daughter not to do anything for her, saying, “Pretend you’re not even here.”   A few minutes later, though, the mother got into difficulty and was really struggling.  From the back seat the daughter finally piped up with “So am I here or am I not here?”

I’ve been feeling pretty much this way all through the year: still living in the same place, but under much altered circumstances (high weirdness factor) and with the awareness that an all-out move was coming.  Let me try that again: a move doesn’t exactly come in the same way that a snowfall or a tornado or a train does; it’s more like we come to it. In the case of our family, we had to bring various pieces of the puzzle together.  Now we’re coming to the crescendo of the whole thing, when we actually move all our stuff into the new place, one with a big field stretching out in back down to a little pond, and re-experience life under one roof.   Amen to that.

During these past months when I’ve still been popping into the town that many people thought we had fully left behind, it’s been disconcerting to be greeted occasionally by an acquaintance with a surprised face and a “Oh, what are you still doing here?” or “Back for a visit?”  Of course it’s nobody’s fault – they assumed that the move happened in one fell swoop.  I explained that it took a long time both to find a suitable new house and to sell the one we have; that my job was close by; that we had a younger son who could benefit from parental proximity during a transition year.  Still, the conversations reminded me of the “neither here nor there” quality of my life.

And then there were the frequent forays up to the new territory, focusing mostly on imbibing some of my husband’s experience and also seeking our new base of operations.  (Yes, I think I could be called a “seeker.”) When I’m able to join the bishop at a service or a special event, I encounter waves of new people — gracious and welcoming.  I get acquainted with a few each time, as far as we are able, and I can’t help but be conscious that I am beginning to experience “there” in its different forms.   As with any new place, it’s vast in its possibilities, and I can try to put my hand up perpendicular to my forehead and, like an explorer, look out over the new landscape and decide how to move forward into this new adventure.

Inevitably, there’s the going through of all the possessions – kind of like a stream that has to be crossed en route to the new territory.  Yes, of course it makes sense to be culling all the way along, no matter whether a move is in the works or not.  Let’s face it, though, isn’t this whole part of the process pretty boring?  And, in my case anyway, hasn’t there just about always been a game or a service or a music lesson (juggling the order is fine) to get to, a class to prepare, a dog to walk, or a conversation to be had?  OK, something akin to this would be true for everybody else too…I know many of you are probably expert cullers –not to be confused with scullers, people who can row a very narrow boat so it glides fast over the water. My husband belongs to this skilled group, and – come to think of it  – he’s also adept at tossing old toys and games from the basement.

And so it is that I am spending this Memorial Day weekend going through closets, sorting through memories.  There are the framed pictures of our young actor, when he had his shining moment as Winthrop in The Music Man; the in-between size clothes; the much treasured sports jerseys; the boxes of high school notebooks bringing back so many late nights of studying in this house.  Just toss them?

Yes, going through the stuff is a tedious task.  But of course it’s also stirring, dredging up as it does past chapters which are unmistakably past, and yet — there they are again suddenly in your hands.

Thinking of the richness of our friendships in this community, I know that they will now enter a new phase and that I must be brave about it.  At the end of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden says, “Don’t tell anybody anything.  If you do, you start missing everybody.”  I’m already starting to miss everybody, but I also know that I have a pretty deep-seated need to stay connected, to make a bridge between whatever “here” and “there” I am experiencing.  The fact is, I don’t really know how to live any other way. Do you?

So I end this time with a shout-out to all of our local key people — you know who you are.  New Hampshire’s not so far, and the hospitality there, not to mention the mountains, will be awesome!  Thanks for sticking with us through this unusual year, and for helping to launch us into what is to come.

And now, as you might have already suspected, and as my husband reminds me, it’s time for me to get off the computer and get moving!