The House is the Shoes

We are preparing for a move. But we don't know where we are moving to yet. We know we need to leave, but we don't know where to. It is unsettling.

We bought this house when we thought we wouldn't be able to have kids. We bought a cute, small house for the two of us to live in. We promptly painted it purple. It was a cute, small house so close to the train tracks that it shakes when they go past and its walls get coated in black soot from their exhaust. A cute, small house so close to the neighbors' houses that we can hear them speaking softly in their houses. We also can hear them yelling and hurting each other and smell their food and their cigarette smoke. It was a cute, small house that doesn't have a parking space and where little rows over parking become big, heated battles with the people we share our street with.

Within a year of buying our cute, small house, we had filled it up with twins. Then another baby a couple years later. We continued to be committed to our town, the place where we have lived longer than any other place in our lives. We went to public meetings, we agitated for positive change. We volunteered for things. We put in roots. We got chickens as pets and put them in the yard. They promptly tore it to pieces and pecked us in the eyes, but they were still our pets.

And now we are looking to move. A million small things have piled up to make us realize that we need to go. But we don't know where. We know we need to go soon. We know we need to have our house ready to show in the spring rush for housing. So we have been going through all of our years of belongings and putting them in a "Keep" pile or a "Donate" pile or a "Trash" pile. The keep pile has things like baby shoes, pictures of us when we were much younger, art that we have made and don't make any more. But the baby things are the hardest. Preparing for this move is admitting that our babies are growing. And that our baby years are over. Our baby things go in the "Keep" or "Donate" piles, but they are not necessary items any more. They are just memories. Our chickens moved to a farm where they will live out their days. The house wouldn't show well with chickens, we were told.

All of our "Keep" pile will go into storage. We will live simply until we know where we are going. We will have to keep our limited possessions neat and put away so that strangers can walk through our house and imagine their things in place of ours, their lives superimposed on what remains of our stuff.

Our kids get sad whenever we go on trips, whenever it is time to leave. They attach their sadness onto possessions, usually. For example, when we left a family trip to Georgia for Thanksgiving at their great grandmothers', they had to leave behind old carry-on bags that were falling apart. They cried for the hourlong drive to the airport over their luggage being left at Great Grammy's house. When we left a Christmas trip to my parents' house, we left behind very old, very ill-fitting shoes to be donated to smaller cousins. On our drive to the Tampa airport, they cried big, hard sobs for the shoes being left behind.

We get it: the sadness we feel for the house is the sadness the kids feel for their shoes. The house is the shoes. It's just a place. It feels like it holds the memories, but it doesn't really. The memories are in us. But it's easy to get sad at the thought of moving on and leaving these things behind. We will all be together in our new house. The family is intact and unchanged. It's just the place that will be different.

Impermanence is a theme often studied in meditation and yoga. Pema Chodron addresses change in her book Comfortable with Uncertainty:

"What do you do when you find yourself anxious because your world is falling apart? How do you react when you're not measuring up to your image of yourself, everybody is irritating you because no one is doing what you want, and your whole life is fraught with emotional misery and confusion and conflict? At these times it helps to remember that you're going through an emotional upheaval because your coziness has just been, in some small or large way, addressed. It's as if the rug has been pulled out from under you. Tuning in to that groundless feeling is a way of remembering that basically, you do prefer life and warriorship to death."