True Life Stories:
PACKING IT IN
by Joyce Maynard
Originally published in Self Magazine, July 1996
I
know people who move every year or two, but I'm the type to hunker down
and stay put, myself. I've actually lived in just three houses over the
course of my forty-two years. One was my parents' house, where I spent
my first eighteen years. One was the house I moved to after leaving college,
where I lived on my own for three years and with my husband for the twelve
years of our marriage. The third is the house where I live now -- bought
when that marriage ended seven years ago.
I haven't ventured far afield, either. All three of these houses have been located within a sixty-mile radius of each other, in the state of New Hampshire, where I was born, and where I have been raising my own children for the last eighteen years -- the last seven of them on my own.
I've made a comfortable nest here for my family and me, surrounded by beloved objects and plants. Just last summer, I painted our house (pink) and put in peonies that won't really get established for another couple of years. I put up a new fence for morning glories. As for the inside -- I've remodelled my bathroom and filled my home with yard sale treasures and large, unweildy flea market furniture.
For most of my life, I've had an easy time acquiring possessions and a hard time parting with them. Years after they outgrew them, I couldn't give away my children's clothes or toys, or a teacup I'd loved, even though the handle had broken off. The way some women find comfort in food, I've found mine in junk collecting, as anybody visiting my house can see. To walk into my living room, you wouldn't guess I'd plan on moving any time in the next fifty years. It looks like a good life we're living here in this place, and it has been.
But though I loved my house, and the easy, comfortable existence we were living in our small New Hampshire town, I started noticing, a year or so back, that a kind of stagnation was setting in. Feeling that your life has a rhthym can be comforting, but mine was starting to feel predictable. Every May I planted tomatoes. Every September I started up at my gym again, and every October my resolve began to fade. Every Christmas I put up a tree in the same spot, spent way too much money on presents, and ended up feeling stressed out and edgy. Every February I fell into a low-level depression from so much cold and dark. Then May came, and I was buying tomato plants again.
But my daughter was graduating from high school in June, and my sons were getting older too. I went on a book tour, stopping through a dozen cities across the country, and tried to picture us living in them. Suppose we moved to Nashville and I started writing songs? Suppose we moved to Denver, and woke every morning with mountains out the window? What if we lived in Los Angeles, where my sons and I could play tennis year round? And what if, instead of living in a big house with a big yard to maintain, I rented a little condo, or a cabin, or a houseboat?
More and more, what held me back from changing my life had less to do with resistance to change than it did with simple inertia -- combined with the daunting task of physically pulling off a move. In the same way that I had once told myself, when I was inhabiting an unhappy marriage, that I couldn't leave because it would simply be too hard to pack everything up, I heard myself thinking, "What would I do with my stuff?" And the minute I realized that it was stuff holding me back, I knew the thing to do was get rid of it.
I wasn't miserable. Not suffering from a broken heart, a job layoff, a medical disaster. I wasn't moving out of a desire to be with a long distance lover or move up on the corporate ladder. Mostly what I felt was a need to grow, and a sense that I'd drawn the best nutrients I could out of the soil in my own back yard. What I wanted, for my children as well as myself, was to take in something new. I wanted to look out my window and see mountains, and plants whose names I don't know yet, hear the songs of unfamiliar birds.
I'd also learned -- from my last big move, seven years earlier -- that the experiences that are the scariest and hardest may also offer the greatest possibility for growth and change. Having moved, once, from a home I loved, but had to leave -- when my marriage ended -- to a town where I knew nobody, I learned to trust my ability to make a new good home and new friends, wherever I go. Having survived and even flourished in the aftermath of one move, I knew no move would ever be so scary again.
As a person who needs only a quiet room, a desk, a chair and a place to plug in her computer to earn a living, I possess more freedom than a lot of people do, who feel the urge to live someplace new. I also don't have a husband or extended family to hold me down -- though, living with three children, I hardly travel light through life. Seeing them game for a move helped, no doubt. They recognized, before I did I think, that if you don't feel alright about yourself and your life, it won't matter where you move to. But when you have a core sense of well-being, you take it wherever you go.
I started asking people (friends, but strangers too) where they'd go if they could live anywhere. A number of people mentioned Seattle, but I didn't want to deal with that much rain, and someone said Colorado, where I knew I'd miss the ocean. When the name of Marin County, California, outside of San Francisco, came up for the fifth or sixth time I figured I should take a look. So I bought myself a cheap airline ticket and flew out for the weekend to investigate. I didn't know a soul in Marin County. I'd never even crossed the Golden Gate bridge.
I remember the sense of possibility I experienced when I was sixteen, with a brand new driver's license in my pocket. I felt it when I was eighteen, too, and heading off to college, to a place where hardly anybody knew me, and I knew nobody. I could change my name, dye my hair, take up playing a musical instrument, dispense with my virginity.... My life was a clean slate. Only for a moment, of course. Then I began filling it up again. And -- to a surprising extent -- rewriting my same old story.
When we're younger, we get a few chances to start over like that. But it had been a long time since I felt the way I did at the wheel of my red rental car, driving north out of San Francisco to check out a new town where I might want to live. Usually I listen to music when I drive, but on this particular trip -- that first day, and for the four that followed, as I explored Northern California -- I didn't want song lyrics and DJ patter to disrupt my experience. I was taking in enough already, just surveying the totally unfamiliar terrain of the countryside and trying to imagine myself in this place.
My friend Patricia, who's made a few big moves of her own, had warned me about the dangers of what she calles "pulling a geographic." Meaning, you make this big, dramatic change in your environment, whether it's renting a new apartment or moving to a whole new part of the country, but fail to change anything within yourself. You tidy up your yard, plant new flowers, snip away at the crabgrass in your life, without uprooting it. And then of course, the weeds simply spring up again after the very first rain. "Changing hospital beds," another friend called it. Meaning, you shift your position on the surface of things. But inside, you still have the same problems you always did.
There's definitely a danger, moving, that all you'll really accomplish is to pull a geographic. But sometimes, too, bringing about a change in physical circumstances can result in some deeper changes. Or maybe it's the opposite I found myself experiencing this winter, when I got the urge to move: Deeper changes had occurred already that made a move possible. When I felt clear that my sense of myself no longer depended on my address or how many dishes I had in my cupboard, I called a realtor and put our house on the market.
There was something about pulling up in front of our house and seeing a For Sale sign in the yard for the first time that made me want to cry, same as I do when I look at old photographs of my former husband and me, when we were young and in love, or pictures of our children when they were babies. But I also know that just because something was good once doesn't mean you can hold onto it forever, or that it would be good again, if you could somehow get it back. Our house worked well for us, for seven years. The fact that we spent many happy times in this house over the course of the last seven years doesn't mean it would be a good idea, necessarily, to spend seven more years here.
Then the realtors started bringing prospective buyers through our house. Not yet done letting go, I stayed around too long at first, pointing out special wonderful things about the kitchen and the bathroom they might not have noticed -- the dutch doors leading out to the porch, the special pull-down shelf I'd built to hold a cookbook. I showed them where we put our Christmas tree and told stories about my sons. Finally, gently, the realtor had to explain to me: "These people need to picture their own family in this house, not yours. "
The first actual offer came from a divorced man whose children were grown. His only issue with the house, he said, was where to park his extra-long Lincoln. Maybe he could cut down the lilacs in front, to make a parking space?
I couldn't sleep that night, thinking about our lilac trees, and how my daughter used to wear the blossoms in her hair. When it was time for me to come back with a counter offer, I refused. "Raise the price," I fumed to the realtor. "I don't want to sell the house to him."
Then I made another trip to California, with one of my sons. And this time I became a potential home buyer myself, rather than just a seller. I found a house we loved -- smaller, simpler, brighter, with a tiny yard, but a view of mountains and San Francico Bay out the kitchen window -- where I could picture my family and me. My offer on the house was accepted. By the time we got back to New Hampshire, the sight of the For Sale sign no longer looked so sad. I knew I had to let go of the idea that I could control what happened in our old house, once it wasn't our house any more.
So -- three months from the day I first announced to my family the plan to move, we're packing up the most precious of our belongings and loading them into a small U-Haul, for the cross country trek. We're selling the rest of our stuff at a giant yard sale in a couple of weeks. It doesn't feel so important any more to hold onto every one of my daughter's old dolls or more than one or two baby outfits. I don't need fifteen tea pots. One's enough. My friends are not so easily let go, but I don't have to part with them forever, just because I'm moving away. A strong friendship with some history behind it isn't dependent on geography.
History, of course, is what's hardest to give up here. I know we'll make new friends in our new house, plant new flowers (container gardening this time), cook good meals, fix up rooms. What you don't have, moving to a new place, are old friends and people who knew you in another lifetime. Because of that, I needed to mark my moving by spending good, relaxed times with the people I love best. I tried to find the right object to give to each of my friends and to do the things we'd always meant, but never got around to. I taught my friend Julie how to make pie crust, and she played her flute for me. I took a ride on the back of my friend Joe's motorcycle. I transplanted flowers into my neighbor Lupy's garden.
As much as moving is about shedding the excess baggage, it's also about recognizing which parts of your life are essential, that you need to hold onto. In my case, that meant packing up my favorite music, some art work, my drawing pens and books. Sifting through my mountains of clothes, I realized how few I actually wear, and packed only those.
Sometimes now, lying in bed, among the packing boxes on the eve of our big move, I look around the semi-darkness and feel a shiver of pure terror. Where am I going? What will we find there? It's scary not knowing exactly where you're going or what will happen when you get there. Sometimes it feels as if I'm jumping off the edge of the world, not just moving to California.
But the other part I realize, as I move closer to the day of moving, is what a rare, rich experience this is that we're having. Whenever I tell people what we're doing -- moving to a town three thousand miles away, where I hardly know a soul, the first thing they do is express shock and amazement. The next thing they say is usually, "I wish I could do that myself."
If a person doesn't take risks now and then and reach beyond what's safe and familiar, after all, how can she ever grow? The more you risk, I've learned, the more you stand to gain. It's only when you let go of something you love, maybe, that you'll free your hands to reach out for some good new thing. Moving is about moving away from someplace, of course -- maybe a place you've loved. But it's also about moving to someplace. Some place you may love even more.
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