*We're moved*.
They came and took all our big heavy furniture and set it up in the new house- in and around the electrician still hanging fixtures and the contractors still putting up walls. It looks terrific- just like the house was custom designed for the furniture and people who live here, which of course, it was.
Now, the other house- the house we just moved out of- is a different story. When we moved into that house 15 years ago, we meant to never leave it. So we put down roots- big deep cluttered roots, that worsened as our lives got consumed by being transformed from "normal family" to "cancer family". In the last 8 years by the time I tended to my family, tried to do enough at work to justify my further employment, and care for the farm-largely-put-on-hold, there was precious little time for housekeeping- even my brand of rudimentary cleaning.
Combine that with 3 people who are pack rats and "pile-makers" and you get a house that looks every bit as full without furniture, as with furniture. Except where the furniture used to be are piles of dust bunnies, dead bugs, and other unidentifiable stuff.
It's horrifying.
So we've got till the first to clear out and clean up the old house.
It looks forlorn, but not as sad as I thought it would. I've spent alot of the clean-up time there by myself and I've been talking to the house (Yes. Don't judge me.)
And we're both ready to let go and move on. That house sheltered us and nurtured us, because that's what it does. For over 100 years it's cared for its families. And its new family needs it and will love it as much as we do.
So I'm surprisingly more OK with letting go than I thought possible.
And after all the work, planning, hoping, blood, sweat, tears, delays, frustrations and heartbreak, the new house is not everything I'd hoped it would be.
It's a thousand times more.
Except for the pesky details of having to rework the water/electric service to the barn, running out of fence-funding, and the obvious delay of moving the animals because of that (to be remedied...somehow...before the 1st), the phone company having to run the cable to our house to get us internet service (supposedly to be completed by February 5th), the stove needing to be adjusted from natural gas to propane so it doesn't spew out 2ft high flames when I turn the oven on, the shower floors having to be re-done because the adhesive doesn't like the grout, and Alec's 50 year old vintage toilet having...issues...everything has gone frighteningly smoothly and turned out even better than my mind's eye envisioned when I was drawing it out on graph paper.
The friends and family who've been out to the new place have said it looks like us... and that they've never seen anything like it (does that mean we're weird?).
People HAVE to touch the logs- the logs with the bark still on them. There is something compelling, powerful, comforting about the honesty of their non-conformist widths, shapes, colors and flaws and people feel the need to absorb some of that through their fingertips.
The naturally knotted and variegated wood on the ceilings and walls provide a never-ending exercise in visual interest, the rock fireplace (even though still a work in progress) with its free-form shape begs to be patted like a huge sturdy protective dragon. Even the cement floor has shaded swirls and patterns- and all we did was seal it.
We all three of us wander around almost gingerly- as if at any moment it could disappear like Cinderella's pumpkin carriage.
But every morning we wake up and our house is still around us.
Our family is still together and our house is still around us.
And we'll never, ever take either one of those seemingly simple occurrences for granted.
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