If you’ve been living in a place for over 15 years, past the age of 40, and have this sudden idea of moving, allow me to give you a small bit of advice.
Don’t.
Make peace with your life as it is and content yourself with remaining in the same spot for the remainder of your time on this planet. Why? Because should you choose to start packing, you’ll discover that no matter how minimalistic a life you may feel that you lead, there’s an ugly truth awaiting you…
You have entirely too much crap.
Seriously. It’s everywhere. Hiding in closets and cabinets. I’m not even going to get into the garage – and that’s not a flippant turn of phrase. I mean that once you start down this road, the stuff in your garage will suddenly expand to three times its normal size and you won’t physically be able to enter the room. Critical crap mass.
I’m not saying this from the sidelines. At the moment, I’m in the middle of a moving process that would’ve sent my younger self straight to the bar for the night. And it’s not some kind of maturity that’s helping me avoid that escape route, it’s the fact I can’t find my car keys anywhere and boxes are blocking every door and ground floor window. My only hope is that some time in the near future, an overdue utility bill will cause a human to come to our house and I’ll yell to them from the kitchen vent.
Okay, so maybe it’s not quite that bad. But it’s close. Very close.
After 17 years, we’re packing up our stuff and moving to Saco by way of Westbrook. If that sounds confusing, good – at least we’re on equal terms now.
The idea is for our daughter to attend Thornton Academy, which is a really good independent school in Saco. The catch being, as an independent school, kids can attend from just about anywhere (they even have dorms for international students), but you have to pay tuition – whereas, if you live in Saco, it’s your normal public high school. We’ve been trying to figure out how to make this happen since last Summer because we love our daughter and want what’s best for her to encourage her talents. Which is easy to say when you’re living your normal life and not staring at piles of totes and boxes and wondering where the hell the pizza cutter has gotten to. One tends to grit their teeth a bit while reciting their chosen mantra at that point.
So we’re renting our house for weekly vacation rentals during the Summer and then getting a Winter rental to cover the rest of the year and basically turning it into an investment property. We’ll be moving into a rental in Saco to close the circle on getting the kiddo to Thornton Academy. Sounds good right? Damn near foolproof you might almost say.
Except there’s a gap.
We have about a month and a half between moving out of our house and moving into the new house, which means we’re taking a detour to Westbrook to live with a friend. We’re very lucky to find ourselves in this situation since renting a busted-up outhouse in the middle of an EPA super site right now will run you somewhere north of $1,300 per month along with your kidney as a deposit. No complaints there.
The trouble is a two-stage move. Getting enough of our stuff to make it through about six weeks in a couple rooms we’re lucky to have and then finally moving the rest of our acquired items to the house in Saco while also fitting into the rhythm of our weekly Summer rentals.
Which is all to say this: the blog is going into one of two directions over the next few weeks. Option A is that I use the spare time to go on a writing spree, post daily along with writing new poetry while also knocking out the first down n’ dirty draft of the story I’ve been working on. Option B is that I go completely radio silence since I’ll be sitting in a corner rocking back and forth while mumbling about armadillos coming to steal my porridge in the middle of the night.
Either way, there’s a decent chance for the entertainment of others, provided they keep a safe distance.
Happy Summer y’all!