Ok so we are officially out of the townhouse after two furious weeks of packing and moving, and two chaotic weeks of unpacking and losing things, and now that I’ve had two seconds to breathe, I have been thinking about why I had such strong feelings about leaving the townhouse.
We bought the townhouse when I was 26 years old, our first home purchase. Theo was 3, Ida was 18 months, and Lars and Polly were tucked away in the “don’t even know that I want this yet” corner of my dreams.
We bought it from a bank, who had taken it from the divorcing couple who could no longer afford the payments. In 2010 there were a lot of homes like that: mortgage defaults after the house of cards fell in 2008 and families had hung on as long as they could.
The first year in that house was a rollercoaster. I mostly have really happy memories of it. Just Theo and Ida and me, doing our thing, free as little birds.
By the end of that first year, I was heavily pregnant with Lars and back at work during the day. After the furnace broke during a cold snap and the AC broke during a heat wave, we replaced the HVAC.
Because of course, you have to have a huge expense in your first year in a new house that you already couldn’t quite afford.
When Lars was a baby we had a few more major things in the house, like a big basement flood which impacted three rooms of carpet and baseboards.
In the next several years we updated the bathrooms and the kitchen and added one more baby.
In the next several years after that, we replaced all of the siding and the windows and gutters, reconfigured the yard and the plants a zillion times, dug out a dead tree and planted a new one, and added a fourth bedroom downstairs with a new window and new carpet.
And everybody grew.
You might know that I like to keep records. I have always kept a journal (and/or a blog), I print my instagram into Chatbooks, I make videos every year for my kids’ birthdays with sentimental songs attached. A tradition we’ve kept up at each kid’s birthday has always been to watch all the old birthday videos of that child.
Right around the time we bought our new house, I discovered that the hard drive I had kept alllllll of my data on… including all of the photos and videos I’ve created, audio interviews I’ve done with parents and elderly friends, everything… had malfunctioned and was totally unusable.
“BUT DIDN’T YOU BACK IT UP?!” Well of course I did, but I was not scrupulous. I have some of it in iCloud and some of it in Google Photos and some of it in Amazon Photos and some of it on another hard drive.
And… some of it, apparently… nowhere else.
NO. WHERE.
I have tried Geek Squad, who, after giving it the white-glove clean-room treatment, pronounced the drive dead.
I am going to try a few more companies and see what happens, but I am not optimistic.
Anyway, all of that is to say: I realize that
(A) my whole life isn’t wrapped up in one tiny little house in a corner of the suburbs, and
(B) my whole life doesn’t have to stay preserved in photo and video form,
BUT… I am still very sad to lose those things.
Even though
(A) I have a new house now which I am so thankful for and so excited about (despite the pouring of money and sweat into things we didn’t anticipate and haven’t anticipated yet)
and even though
(B) I have living breathing children who are still growing and laughing and crying and running and skipping and falling and talking and all of those things that happened in the last 17 years whether or not I took videos of it.
I guess I want to keep everything locked up where I can access it anytime I want.
I am a little mad at myself for removing myself from that little home and VERY mad at myself for losing that precious data.
I want to snap my fingers anytime I want and watch videos of my babies.
A Bible verse that has always pulled at me: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
I think I am pretty good at living in the moment. I would say it’s one of my strengths. But I also value the past, a lot.
And saying goodbye to part of my past (the physical walls of the home where my children learned to walk, talk, feed themselves, tie their shoes, play the piano) feels like maybe a little too much to ask of my heart right now.
Yet it’s done. Look, I’ve started across already.
"At the Border"
by Carl Dennis
At the border between the past and the future
No sign on a post warns that your passport
Won't let you return to your native land
As a citizen, just as a tourist
Who won't be allowed to fraternize with the locals.
No guard steps out of a booth to explain
You can't bring gifts back, however modest,
Can't even pass a note to a few friends
That suggests what worries of theirs are misguided,
What expectations too ambitious.
Are you sure you're ready to leave,
To cross the bridge that begins
Under a clear sky and ends in a fog?
But look, you've started across already
And it's one-lane wide, with no room for U-turns.
No time even to pause as drivers behind you
Lean on their horns, those who've convinced themselves
Their home awaits them on the other side.
