Here

When I look out the window, I see trees. Blue sky, mottled with high ridges of white cloud. The wood stove sings its ping-ping-ping song as it cools a little, and I suspect it will soon be time to add another log. It is quiet, the first quiet moment with my fingers on the keyboard in what feels like a long, long time. Six weeks, probably.

Exhale. Return to center.

The tremendous push and strain of hauling all our belongings out of one house and up the hill into the other is finally past. We rode through the contractions of packing and preparing, each flurry of sorting stuff and filling boxes getting closer and more intense until Tom backed the moving truck over the garden bed in the front yard and our friends showed up, ready to help us shift the pile of our belongings with their arms, backs, willing hands.

Just like giving birth, moving house is HARD WORK. Transition is a killer. 11:58 pm the night before and there are still massive piles of junk everywhere as we try to disassemble our bed frame. We are going to be pushing this out very soon and why aren’t we ready? Why is this so hard? I’ve changed my mind now! Please stop the ride, I want to get off! But there is no getting off, no get out of jail free card. Even if there was, I wouldn’t really have taken it, just as I wouldn’t really and truly have wished to stop my labours at 9cm. But big changes hurt.

And then those first moments in a new place, ours, for a while. Discovering the little things. Counting the drawers in the kitchen just like I counted those tiny newborn fingers and toes, except that the number of drawers was a surprise.

Now we’re learning new rhythms, creating new habits. Somehow this comes more easily when everything familiar has been stripped away. Instead of standing at the change table to change a diaper, I’m standing at the sink to wash dishes. Carrying in firewood. Feeding the fire. Walking down the road to the mailbox.

Instead of learning to breastfeed and function on sleep snatched in 90 minute increments, I’m learning how to reverse around a corner and down a gravel hill in our manual transmission car each and every time we want to leave the driveway. This doesn’t come easily but I know I’ll get better with practice (and lots of practice will happen out of necessity.)

We are here. Before we left I would dream of this house. Now that we’re here I dream of the other. Like transparencies on the overhead projector, these images blur the lines of here and there. Both houses existing simultaneously. But my body can inhabit one house at a time, and right now I am here in this little valley full of trees.

Tagged as: birth, Moving