Hanging in the Air

Something a little different this week. I am five days from moving house, and my thoughts are as cluttered with that as most of my spaces are with cardboard boxes. It feels as if I’ve thrown my entire life into the air and am waiting, with arms outstretched, to see whether I can catch it. (If you knew anything about my typical level of hand-eye coordination, you’d know just how dire a scenario this is.)

This last month has been such a gaudy, deafening fireworks clash of emotions. Hope that life is about to become happier and more stable, fear that we might be making a terrible mistake. Disbelief at the sheer amount of stuff that can accumulate in the corners and closets of a house, grim let-god-sort-it-out resignation as we give up on winnowing and just toss it all into boxes. Frustration and exhilaration and, more than anything else at this point, just wanting to be on the other side of it all. To skip ahead in this story, at least by a week or so, and see how it all works out.

There are things I won’t miss. The neighbourhood dogs that bark at so much as blowing leaves, the busy intersection where almost being hit by careless drivers is practically just part of my weekly routine. Things I consider now with an almost spiteful triumph, thinking of leaving them behind. But I’m trying to carve out far more space than that for gratitude. For focusing on the ways this place has sheltered and pushed me and helped me grow. If never perfect, it has been home, and that makes it worth leaving with love.

I hope I can look back on this in a year or two and be amazed at how well everything has worked out. I hope the apprehension I feel now is almost unrecognizable by then – an old memory that my future self views with compassion and forgiveness from a great distance.

I hope this home is as loved as it deserves to be by someone else.