Mixed

The kids are in full time daycare ("camp") while I work my way slowly through our house, performing triage. Each item needs to be carefully or quickly considered and sorted either in a box to be moved, on to the porch to be given away, or in a trash bag to be thrown away. As I moved through the attic yesterday, I spent far too many minutes perusing boxes of old journals, letters, stacks of photos, hand written notes in the margins of old school books. Things that were lifted directly in to the attic when we moved in and have not been touched since. Doubtlessly, I will not look at them again until, perhaps, our next move, and then only briefly. These papers and pictures, pounds and pounds and pounds of them, follow us everywhere, presumably accruing value as the years pass and we stretch even further from identity of the person who created them.

My old journals still make me cringe, and I am still waiting for the moment when the naiveté of the ideas and simplicity of the syntax seem cute and endearing as opposed to bloody embarrassing. So move them I must. They are not tossed in to the dump pile. Instead I pull a muscle in my lower back and nearly lose my balance on the bottom rung of the ladder trying to schlep them from the attic to the POD, to be enjoyed one day by my grand daughter, who hopefully will find them, at best, endearing.

As I look through the mementos and relics my heart is tugged back and forth. I find the pictures from our moving day, when Jasper was only six weeks old and lying like a bird's egg in the middle of King Friday (the oversized bright orange bean bag) under the tree in the back yard. I am reminded of the friends who came to help, drinking beer and plucking raspberries from the patch (before I killed most of the bushed with Round Up by mistake). Jasper has spent nearly his entire life in this house. Those friends are still so very, very good. Most will be here to help us move the same stuff out next month.

Then I come across my sixth grade class photo. I have fallen out of touch with many of my classmates, but several of them live in the DC area. Will we become reacquainted? Will we have anything to say to one another? I find a stack of brochures from the summer camp where I went when I was five and where Jasper will go this year. I am flooded with memories of school, parks, swimming, dancing, sticky hot summers at the zoo, dinners with my folks, concerts on the national Mall, sailing, late summer nights at the Cathedral... I am going home. My home will be my children's home. This feels like a good thing.

There is also the promise that we will be living in a new DC. I grew up exclusively in Cleveland Park, Northwest. I had very little time to explore the city as an adult before I left. I am really looking forward to getting to know our nation's capital on my/ our own terms. I am excited to live in a neighborhood with a Salvadoran restaurant and an African dance theater, and where our skin color is less common than other hues, and where many languages other than English are spoken on stoops and in back yards. This will be our home, not my home, and that will feel very different.

I try not to focus on all that we are leaving. All of the friends, the family, the fresh air, the mountains, the beach, the relative simplicity of life. This has been a good place for us for so many reasons. Every time I have left DC it was always with the assurance that I would return. It would always be my "home," my parents weren't going any where. I feel the same way about Western Massachusetts. I know we will return every summer, and at least once during the fall or winter. We may move back there one day. But New Hampshire feels fleeting. Considering the cost of travel and how much less vacation Peter and I will have, how often will we really come back? Not often. This is good bye. Even though so many other doors are opening, it is still sad to see this one close.

HOWEVER, regardless of where we go next or where we end up, our children will always be "from New Hampshire." They will spend their entire lives reaching back towards these mountains and lakes. And that is a very big thing.