Moving to Buenos Aires Argentina
12 May 98
We are moving again. Usually before we move, I sit up alone late at night--after the children are in bed--in a spotless house that has been stripped of any indication that a real family actually lives in it. The towels in the bathroom are untouched. The sink and the counters in the kitchen gleam. The carpets carry nary a single footprint to mar their just-vacuumed surface. But this time, the house sold while we were away for a week visiting Dad and Cindy. It was clean when I left and sold when I returned. This move finds me sitting in my own little oasis of chaos that surrounds the computer. Paid and unpaid bills fill the cubby holes along the wall. The bulletin boards behind the computer are dotted with reminder cards of doctor and dentist appointments kept long ago. There are files bristling with papers that I shall need--but whose location I will not be able to remember when the time comes. I have a bottle of cherry flavoured Chloraseptic oral anesthetic spray beside the computer monitor that I douse my lower gums and my tongue with periodically to numb the ache that my just-tightened braces cause. There are notebooks and directories and notebooks and magazines stacked in a precarious pile next to the phone. And when the phone rings, I often have to dig through the pile of papers that I have just placed on top of it because there was no other place to put them. There are pills and hard disks and CD computer programs and a newspaper photo of a 53 year old ballerina floating through the air that I cut out and have saved since November of 1993.
Yes, this move is indeed different. Compared to my familiar, cluttered computer space, the rest of the house is very tidy indeed. The chairs, the tables, the bookcases--even the piano--are encased in layer upon layer of protective wrapping. There are mountainous piles of boxes lined up along the edges of the rooms like wall-flowers waiting to be asked to dance. The center floor of each room echoes brightly as if it were lit by a spot light. It is a strange feeling. We are moving and the house is messy where we live, soldier straight where the movers have been packing, and a welcoming sight when I pull into the driveway.
I feel a special pang when I think of moving from this house. There is a vague, uneasy feeling within me because I am going to a home that will not be mine. I will not be free to poke holds in the walls so that I might hang my dozens of pictures where I please. I will not be able to have Brent attach shelves where ever a whim directs me so that I might have a convenient place for a TV. I will not be able to hang a deep, paisley, floral wallpaper with a muted, Noah's ark boarder to welcome me to my own bedroom. I will be moving into someone else's home to live for three years. I am not giving up my home for another one--but to become a nomad. Like Sariah, we will be "getting by" with whatever we can find available to us. Certainly moving to a modern, European kind of city for three years, to live in a four bedroom house with maid's quarters, and a pool and a great climbing tree in the backyard, is nothing like leaving great wealth and an influencial social position in order to waunder through the wilderness for untold years. But, like Sariah, I am leaving the majority of my most precious earthly treasures--photo albums of our family history, scrap books of each of the children, pictires and paintings and counted cross stitch wall hangings, the handkerchef doll that my mother made for me and gave me the year before she died. There will not be space for them in our new home.
The children are also leaving a great many of their things behind. There will be no place for the doll house that Brent made for Megan or for the collection of dolls that Lauren got from her grandmother.
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