Pardon the prolonged silence. I’m emerging (though the emergence is very labored and practically imperceptible) from the haze of moving. I feel very old and slow, like all my joints are made of metal and my eyelids are drooping. Does anyone else agree that moving ages you?
Earlier this summer my mom decided to retire. We threw a huge bash for her and then made plans to put the house on the market. Given the current real estate climate, we prepared ourselves for a long wait, lots of open houses, even more showings, and maybe—six months down the road—an offer.
Within ten days, she had an accepted offer, including a 30-day escrow, and we are quickly closing in on the day the house will change hands for the first time in forty years. Not only has my mom been scrambling to get her things packed and shipped off to her next residence (a granny flat at my brother’s house in South Florida), this quick offer meant Steve and I and the babies had to find a new place to live with about two weeks notice. Did I mention Steve was on a trip while all this was happening? Of course he was.
In a whirlwind of circumstances, we found just the right place for now, signed a lease, and packed up all our belongings from my mom’s. We also made arrangements to have the contents of our storage units (yes, plural) packed up and delivered to our new house. And we have been digging out for the last week. Still digging. Still digging.
Yet, relief sits right under the surface of the fatigue. I think it was Virginia Woolf who wrote, “A placeless person is a silenced person.” Though we were by no means placeless at my mom’s in the physical sense, we were placeless in an emotional sense . . . taking meals on someone else’s dishes, so to speak.
On the heels of my mom’s decision, my dad and stepmom have also decided to move out of state to a beautiful marina in Washington. Soon, too soon, I will be the last Miller in San Diego. My growth group asks me how I feel about all this. I don’t have a clear answer yet. Perhaps I feel uncertain, untethered. Yes, that seems to fit. I am feeling like my roots are about to be severed, which makes a person feel like they are floating and not really connected to anything, cut loose from some of the things that have defined me my entire life.
Redefinition can be a good thing, but it’s never easy. New roots for a new season. I feel excited and fragile.
In Found Art, I wrote about what it’s like to navigate a foreign place, and what the foreign places of life have to offer us. When I was writing that book, I don’t think I fully appreciated how much I would come back to the phrase – “foreign places.” Life has a way of continually inviting us into new waters, deserts, wonderments, wastelands, displacements. We are continually invited up to the top of the rock as the world cries out, “3-2-1 Jump!!”
So here we are, once again, navigating the foreign places of a new home (where in the heck do I get gas!?!), a new familial arrangement (family literally strewn from North West to South East), and a new emotional milieu (who will I be here without my parents?).
I am forced to turn inward, to the deeper recesses, to the soul place. There, I always have a home, though it’s a home that I need to frequent far more often than I do.
And now I will eat the beautiful tomato Fern, my new neighbor, delivered to my door yesterday. What a nourishing offering. And could you love the name “Fern” any more? Considering a third child if only to utilize the name Fern . . .
More musings to come on home, place, and identity. In the meantime, please share about any “placelessness” you’ve experienced lately, or perhaps, any “placing” too. How are you feeling oriented or disoriented today?
Love upon love.
