Thoughts on Moving by Nancy L. Eady

After having had the house on the market since last October, we have a contract for sale, and hopefully we will be moving in less than two weeks. Every time we move, I realize that I’ve forgotten how much I hated it the last time. I am excited about the new house and location, but I’m nervous about all the thousand and one things that have to go right for the closing on our house and the closing on our new house to happen as scheduled. Such practicalities aside, I have compiled a list of things that either prove you will be moving soon or show that you are in the process of moving.

You will be moving soon if:  

1) You changed the shelf paper in the house any time recently. (Confession time: I don’t have shelf paper in this house.) 

2) You will be moving soon if you order new checks with your address on them. (Yup, we did that last year.) 

You know you are moving if any of the following are true: 

1) You are on a first-name basis with the Home Depot greeter, or the cashier at the local U-Haul, and they keep a stack of boxes reserved especially for you.

2) Images of full trash bags (with someone else’s stuff) dance in your head.

3) You tell someone, “I don’t care what it costs; all books are coming with us!”

4) Your husband gives you an uneasy glance when you inform him that you and you alone will pack the craft room.

5) You raise the art of swearing at the tape gun that refuses to work correctly for you to new heights. (The tape guns always work well for Mark and my daughter; I end up in the middle of a wadded tangle of tape.) 

6) You are seriously considering donating everything you own to charity and moving to Key West, where you will live in a tent in ultra-minimalist style.

7) You ditch the Key West idea because two parents, one 24-year-old girl, and three dogs are too much for one tent to hold.

8) You have to navigate a labyrinth of boxes to reach either end of the house. While navigating, you discover where the book boxes are by running into them. A trip to the ER is optional.

Hopefully, the next time you hear from me, it will be from a new location. 

Have you had any adventures in moving that make for good stories? 

Waiting by Nancy L. Eady

 Normally, these last two weeks in October, at least until the day of Halloween, is a time when I get to take a deep breath and relax before the insanity of the holiday season, which for me starts on Halloween and ends January 2. Alas, not so this year.

 I am not naturally organized. My husband swears there is no such thing as an organization gene, but I disagree. I put things down in random places, collect important papers in piles I mean to sort through some day and place multiple craft supplies, writing utensils and my computer out in the open within easy reach in case I get a yen to work with any of them. I need at least one cache of disorganization somewhere in my house to feel comfortable.  

 As of today, October 27, my house has been on the market for 21 days. The problem with having your house for sale is that it must stay in show-worthy condition. Open pockets of disorganization are frowned upon by real estate agents. The sheer neatness is driving me crazy.

 Every time someone looks at the house, we are supposed to move the dog beds and carriers out of the house into the garage in advance, on the theory that some people don’t like pets in the house and if they see accoutrements relating to pets, they will decide not to like the house. I’m thinking the big plastic bin of dog food in the kitchen might be a dead give-away, regardless of the dog beds, but maybe not.

 My daughter has the least enviable job. When a showing is imminent, her job is to load all three dogs in her car and drive around with them until the showing is over. It wouldn’t be such a bad job except that our oldest dog, Daisy, tends to get car sick on twisty backroads and my daughter loves driving on twisty backroads.

 I try to remind myself of all the the blessings to be thankful for while we go through this process—my husband has a new job, we have a house to sell, my firm will work with me once we move so I can continue to be employed by it, and we will buy a house in our new location once this house sells. That helps, as does my constant reminder to myself that I am selling a home, not a museum, so minor imperfections are okay. Meanwhile, I’ll console myself for the state of uncommon organization in my household with thoughts of the glorious chaos that will exist after we sell this house and move into the next one. Three weeks into that process, I expect I’ll look fondly back on this oasis of organization as a Golden Age.  

We're Moving (Again!) by Nancy L. Eady

So, I’ve done everything humanly possible to make sure this didn’t happen. I didn’t change the shelf paper in the kitchen cabinets (we don’t have shelf paper in the kitchen cabinets for exactly that reason. My dishes and glasses haven’t suffered for lack of it.) We made sure we weren’t traveling on New Year’s Day. (This superstition may be restricted to my family, where we firmly believe that if you travel on New Year’s Day, you will move during the next year. I can’t even tell you where it started.)

When we moved into this house in May 2021, I swore it would be my last move ever. I even made sure I got to that last box that never gets unpacked and unpacked it over a year ago. And yet here we are – about to go through the whole moving process one more time.

After a long search, my husband has taken a job in another city about two hours north of where we live now. I’m not fond of the moving process, but I don’t mind where we’ll end up, becasue my mother and one of my sisters and her family live there. But I dread putting the house on the market, waiting for it to sell, packing up and moving, then looking for another house and moving into it, and spending hours unpacking again.            

My husband had a good idea to help with unpacking – invite all of my family over for Christmas dinner and to open gifts. Once we’ve finished with the gifts, we’ll tell them since they’ve gotten so good at unwrapping things, we have a surprise—and hand out boxes for unpacking. We could even throw in a “Dirty Santa” twist, where people get to swap the boxes before opening them. (Okay, we’ll probably not do that, but it was fun to think about!)

Late this spring, I went to my mom’s house and dug up several irises descended from irises my grandmother used to grow in Massachusetts and planted them on one side of the house. I figured since they didn’t bloom this spring, they wouldn’t bloom this fall. But two days ago, I walked outside and Grandma Caulfield’s irises were blooming. I thought it was a sweet way for the old house to wish me and my family well as we start this journey yet again.

What is your least favorite part of moving? Do you have a good story about moving? Any advice? I'd love to hear it.

A BLANK PAGE CONSTRAINED BY CHARACTER by Nancy L. Eady

Moving has me considering character—not character as in whether you would give me a good reference, but character as in the traits that form the people who populate my stories.

My family and I live in a new house in a new town. You would think this is a chance to completely reinvent ourselves. In theory, we should be able to act however we want and to be whoever we want. In practice, it’s not that simple. Even when you move, your history and character move with you.

For example, I could try to make strangers believe I’m fearless. But I’m still going to insist my husband perform roach-killer duty should I run across a live version of one of the loathsome things. (Odds are good I am going to call on him even if I run across a dead version.) 

On a more fundamental level, I am a compulsive rule follower. I feel like a wild rebel just ignoring the travel lanes in an empty parking lot. When the stores all had directional signs on aisles for COVID, I was the family member that refused to allow us to go up the down aisle, even if the item we needed was two steps away in the wrong direction. While it’s physically possible for me to ignore rules now that I am in a new town, mentally, it’s not. Nor can I change the parts of my personality that I unconsciously broadcast to the community at large. I exude an aura that leads people to consider me both safe and knowledgeable; in a crowded store or park, I’m the person people stop for directions. It happened yesterday, as a matter of fact. I was walking down the aisle in the Leeds Walmart when a woman asked me where something was located. I regretfully told her that it was my first time in the store and I couldn’t help. Had I then found the thing she was looking for, I would have been compelled to find her to tell her. In a new place free of expectations, I should have been free to go on with my day, but I wasn’t. My character constrained my actions.

The same is true with the characters we writers create. Readers may think we authors control our characters, but we know better. Our characters come with their own history and back story and traits. If we need them to do something that doesn’t line up with those, they resist us. Some argue vociferously against whatever we are trying to force them to do; some take a more passive-aggressive approach, giving us a vague feeling that something in the story is “not working,” and leaving it for us to discover what that is.

We can’t force our characters to be someone they’re not, but what we can do is change the environment they’re in or the challenges they face. So, while we don’t control their character, we can change their environment. Their reactions and responses to those challenges lead them to grow and change so that we (and our readers if we’re lucky) learn a little more about human nature in the process.

What characters in your writing have you found to be unmanageable?

THE UNEXPECTED TURN CONTINUES by Nancy L. Eady

 At the end of March, I wrote about the unexpected turn taking us from our long-time home in Tallassee, Alabama toward the Birmingham, Alabama area. Writing this towards the end of May, I am both impressed by our accomplishments and overwhelmed by what remains.

First, an update. Since April 20, we sold our house (twice), had one sales contract fall through, bought our new house (twice—we had to withdraw the first offer because of the first sales contract) and learned that with a little prayer and great mortgage company, it is possible to apply for and receive a mortgage loan in 19 days. I gave away 14 boxes of books to the local library in Tallassee, which was traumatic. We packed our old house ourselves in less than 19 days and we moved out of it three days ago, and into our new house yesterday. We learned Saturday night that you can run a Sleep Number bed without internet, and I learned (Mark already knew) that Dish TV would work without internet. I’m still looking forward to the arrival of the internet man tomorrow morning, though. I’m using my telephone hotspot right now, and it drains the battery.

You’d think I’d be feeling a great sense of accomplishment given all that we’ve gotten done so far, right? I would, except for the following:

Those of you who have moved before probably don’t think that looks too bad, as far as unpacking goes, but, like Bluebeard’s Castle, we have a room with a hidden secret.

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We had the movers store every box possible in the spare bedroom. Which was a wonderful idea until we discovered last night at nine that we couldn’t remember where the bedroom TV cord was packed. After about two hours of looking, we gave up. (We found it this morning—in one of our suitcases.)  

This is the first move for both dogs. They seem to be taking it well so far.

Darwin, who we think is 15 or 16, wondered why I was interrupting his nap for this picture.

Daisy, about 2, runs around on high alert, ready to sound the alarm should anything appear out of place. Obviously, the pillow and CPAP hose are highly suspicious objects, even though she saw the same things in the old house every day.

The good news is that it truly is downhill from here. Even though we have a lot of unpacking to do, we get to choose what and when we unpack. How will we know when we’re finished unpacking? When we reach the last box that gets moved from one place to another and never quite gets unpacked until the next move. We found the last box from our move into our Tallassee house (the move in 2006) in the coat closet while we were packing for this move. The box was still packed, but it had at least been opened.

And so it goes…

The Unexpected Turn by Nancy L. Eady

 For 30 years, I have lived various places between Alexander City, Alabama and Montgomery, Alabama. Unremarkable for some, but for a Navy brat who moved every two to three years until she was 16, miraculous. Also, for 30 years, I have worked at the same building at the same firm. And in spite of such a confined geographical area, we have found jobs in the area that allowed my husband’s career to grow as well. If you had asked me six months ago, I would have said that we would spend the rest of our lives somewhere along this 50-mile stretch of road. Heck, I would have said the same thing last week when I wrote my last post. And I have been actively helping my husband search for a new job since October and praying for new opportunities and vistas for my family. We’ve always found a job for him in this area.

There are drawbacks to certainty. The biggest one for me was eventually retiring in the small town where we live. It’s nice enough, but the hour to two-hour round trip to go to Publix or Home Depot wears you down. I’m not from here, which makes friendship-making harder, especially right now during COVID, especially when coupled with the fact that I drive 45 minutes each way to work, and my husband drives an hour and 20 minutes one way.

There are positives to certainty. I don’t ever expect to love a house the way I love the house we live in. While friendship-making is harder, it’s not impossible and I have good friends here. And the building and people I work with are my home, too.

But, out of the blue, an opportunity has opened in the Birmingham area for my husband, and we are taking it. When the job offer first came, we felt like a dog must feel when he finally catches a car he is chasing. We didn’t know quite what to do with it. I’m still a little shell-shocked, caught somewhere between “Holy crap! I have a lot of stuff to get done,” and “Hot Dog! We’ll finally live in a bigger place.”  Not to mention navigating all the “what-ifs”—what if the house takes months to sell? What if we can’t find a decent house in the new area we can afford? What if our daughter is miserable up there once we move?

There are drawbacks to uncertainty. Worries pop up daily, imagined and real. The sense of continuity you had, before the uncertainty, departs. Familiar things look different. I saw my 15-year-old house one way last week and differently this week. You don’t quite realize how much needs to be done around a house until you get it ready to sell.

There are positives to uncertainty. It galvanizes you into action and tantalizes you with possibilities. Your soul stretches to reach new, unforeseen places. You take the most familiar things around you less for granted.

As a writer, the shift from certainty to uncertainty gives me new insights into my characters. It helps me empathize with my characters as I place them (deliberately, with malice aforethought) in difficult situations. It helps me understand more ways to describe to you, the reader, the feelings my character experiences. It gives me ideas on how characters are going to deal with the situation(s) I have placed them in. And it shows me why I am a sucker for happy endings. I would like nothing better than to end this next (hopefully brief) season of uncertainty with the words,” And they all lived happily ever after!”

A Moving Experience by Guest Blogger Lena Gregory

Moving From New York to Florida

A Guest Post by Lena Gregory

In Scone Cold Killer, All-Day Breakfast Café #1, Gia moved from New York to a rural area of Florida. She sent all of her stuff down ahead, and her best friend, Savannah, moved everything into the house for her. Let me tell you, I was wishing Savannah was real and would do the same for me a few weeks ago! My husband and I moved from Long Island, New York to Clermont, Florida with our two sons, our daughter, our son-in-law, and all four of our dogs.

We spent the better part of a week packing two PODs to move. My husband was beyond frustrated trying to fit everything in, then he closed one of the doors for a couple of minutes and when he opened it again, a bunch of stuff came tumbling out. My eight-year-old son was building box forts in the POD then getting upset when anyone took a box (but he helped A LOT when he wasn’t building). My daughter and son-in-law were trying to help my husband so they didn't get anything of their own packed until the night before we left, and my other son and I were trying to pack the things that were left all over the house that I hadn't gotten to packing yet. We did all work together, but the end result was, we needed another POD. So I ordered a seven foot POD that came the next day.

I started out so organized, everything neatly wrapped, packed, and labeled. By eight o'clock Sunday night, I was opening drawers and closets and just dumping stuff into boxes and slapping some tape on them. Even though I’d spent months packing for the move, and pretty much had a maze throughout my entire house between all of the boxes and furniture, I hadn't even started packing the kitchen yet. I started packing kitchen stuff the night before the PODs were due to be picked up. After one box, I decided I didn't really need anything from my kitchen. 

Thankfully, I changed my mind about that by the time I got home from work the next day. But my house looked like a bomb hit it, the PODs still weren't fully packed, and I was too exhausted to even think about tackling it all. I grabbed a box and started dumping all of the utensil trays (knives and all) into the box. When my daughter came in and asked if I had a box ready, I looked down into the box I’d just “packed” and found knives and forks sticking up every which way like Pick-up Stix. 

My daughter took one look into the box, looked up at me and said, “Mom, why didn’t you just leave the stuff in the trays and put the trays in the box?”

Okay, so it made perfect sense after she pointed it out.

Once everything was packed into the PODs, (whatever would fit, anyway) we had to spend ten days in our basically empty house. At least, it seemed empty, until the night we had to pack the car to leave. Then, not so much. We had to drive with our eight-year-old and our twenty-year-old crammed into the back seat. They each had a small spot on the seat, but the floors in front of them were filled to the top with stuff, so they had to sit curled up on the seats all the way to Virginia.

We needed to get our car down to Florida with us, and the drive from Long Island to Florida is getting harder and harder for my husband and I to do (especially when my husband had already been awake for 37 hours and I’d been up for more than 20 hours by the time we left) so we drove from Long Island to Virginia, then got on the auto train, while my daughter and son-in-law each drove their cars with all of the dogs. I love the auto train. We can sit back, put our feet up, watch movies, sleep, go to the dining car to eat. So much better than sitting in traffic on I-95, pumping ourselves full of caffeine so we can stay awake to drive.

They load the cars onto the train, then hook them up to the passenger cars. The full train ends up being about 3/4 of a mile long. It leaves Lorton, VA at 4pm and reaches Sanford, FL at 9am the next morning. We used to take it when we vacationed in Florida, too, since I don't fly and I like to have my own car with me. I wish they had the auto train cross country! I'd love to travel across the US that way. By that time, the stress of packing and moving and driving was all behind me, so did I relax?

Nope. Of course not. I stressed over whether or not I would like the new house. We’d bought it without me ever having seen it. It seemed nice online, and it was a perfect set-up for us with a house for us and a second house for my daughter and her husband connected by a garage, so we bought it. My daughter and her husband had seen it before we bought it, and my husband and oldest son flew down a few months later and saw it, but my youngest son and I had never been there. 

Thankfully, we walked in and LOVED it, despite the snake living in the bushes right outside the dining room window (which those of you who have read the All-Day Breakfast Café series will understand my fear of since it matches Gia’s). Now we have boxes stacked all over the place, furniture in every room except where it actually belongs, and I have spent two weeks doing nothing but painting, staining, and laying floors. And I couldn’t be happier! 

Have you ever moved? Tell me about your experience. Were you completely organized and ready to go, or were you running around like a lunatic at the last minute trying to get everything together and done?

Wine, Bread, and Thou

by James M. Jackson

For the last two months I have been consumed by changing residences. First, we decided to buy a place in Madison, Wisconsin to replace our winter residence in Savannah, GA. Closing was scheduled for the end of December. In December my mother chose to show her enthusiasm for my plan to live closer to her by falling and breaking her hip. Surgery repaired the break, and before Christmas, she moved to a rehab facility.

Jan and I drove to Madison to spend Christmas with Mom, leaving earlier than we had anticipated in order to avoid snow storms pummeling the Midwest. It was the first time in years Mom had her three children together with her for Christmas.

The purchase of our place in Madison occurred on time, but not without drama. I’ve put that trauma behind me and won’t reopen the scabs. We camped out at our place in Madison, sleeping on a blow-up bed, long enough to bring in the New Year with Mom. Then we returned to Savannah.

By mid-January, it became clear that Mom’s rehab was not going to progress sufficiently to allow her to walk again, which meant we’d have to move her from her very nice Assisted Living apartment into a Nursing Home.

My sisters found the right place for her. I came back to Madison to do the heavy lifting—literally: moving from her apartment to her new room her favorite recliner, clothes, toiletries, etc. I brought the remaining pictures, mementoes, and books to store in my recently-acquired basement. Everything else I schlepped to various charities to find new appreciative owners.

Mom’s 95^th birthday was January 31st, so I remained in the area for the celebration (we had a pizza party) with my sisters and then headed back to Savannah. My first task there was to help select a mover to get our stuff from Savannah to Madison. We’ll let them pack the fragile stuff, but we’re packing everything else. But first, we went through our possessions to determine what wouldn’t go with us, donating the excess to charities if there was value, filling trash cans where there was none.

This coming Monday is packing day; Tuesday they load the truck. We’re getting low on rations in the house. Wednesday night was our last “traditional” meal. Later meals become a feast of leftovers. No more grocery shopping unless it’s something vitally important. On Tuesday, Jan announced her grocery list: Wine and bread. Both met the vitally important criterium.

“Aha,” I said, recalling a long-forgotten lesson from high school. “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.” I stopped, puzzled. “There’s something else about a wilderness in there, too.” Google came to my rescue.

From “The Rubaiyat” by Omar Khayyam (as translated), the line goes: “. . . A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness . . .”

Yep, that about sums it up: Jan and I are off to our next adventure in living, singing our fool heads off. At least we have the wine and bread.

***

James M. Jackson authors the Seamus McCree mystery series. Empty Promises, the fifth novel in the series—this one set in the deep woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—is now available. You can sign up for his newsletter and find more information about Jim and his books at https://jamesmjackson.com.

Garden Grief

by Linda Rodriguez

We're getting ready to sell our house, pack up, and move to a much smaller house with a much smaller yard about eighteen blocks from the big old house where I've lived for forty-two years. Making this move is the right choice for me, I'm sure. This house has been a wonderful house to raise my daughter and two sons in. It's been a house where many other people could come and feel welcome, including two foster sons and a nephew who needed a home, as well as grown brothers and sister who needed a place to live at various times in their lives. When my kids were small—and even teenagers—this house was neighborhood central for all their friends. One of my oldest son's friends told me the other day that he thought he had spent as much or more time in our house as he did in his own when he was growing up.

You might think, under those circumstances, that I'd be a little teary and grieving over leaving the old home place, but I'm not. This house was great for many years, but now it's not—too big, too old, too many stairs, too much maintenance on house and yard. I'm quite ready to move on with a fond farewell.

What I am grieving over is the loss of my gardens. Our buyers intend to just clear-cut the yards in front and back and put them into grass, and of course, that's their prerogative once we've closed. As if the gardens know this is their last spring and summer, they have been magnificent—one last burst of glory. We've unfortunately been too busy downsizing and preparing for this transition to take any photos, but we've marveled at what the unusual long spring, heavy rains, and shockingly mild summer have done for the flowers.

The photos on this post were taken a couple of years ago during more usual weather conditions and right after a thunderstorm that had knocked down iris and peony blooms, so it doesn't look nearly as lush as it does right now. Here's the list of what my gardens contain, front and back, though not all of it blooms at once, of course.

Plants In My Garden

Crape myrtle

Southernwood

White peony

Bowl of Beauty peony

Yellow iris

Purple iris

Various bicolored iris

Peace rose

Large old species rose

Chocolate mint

Native daylily

Native goldenrod

Milkweed

Butterfly weed

Native hydrangea

Native geranium/hardy geranium

Butterfly bush

Lamb’s ears

Costmary

Mugwort

Fennel

Rue

Lemon balm

Peppermint

Oregano

Tansy

Sweet Annie

Sage

Wild strawberry

June-bearing strawberry

Red clover

Various hybrid daylilies

Various hybrid Oriental lilies

Missouri primrose

Black-Eyed Susan

Purple coneflower

Bouncing bet

Wood sage

New England aster

Sweet autumn clematis

Naked ladies/ American amaryllis

Liatris/gayfeather/blazing star

Bee balm

Columbine

Mayapple

Lily of the Valley

Yellowbells

Periwinkle

English ivy

Honeysuckle

Gladiolus

Petunia

Marigold

Wax begonia

Wormwood

Daffodil

Various colored tulips

Common violet

Rose of Sharon/American hibiscus

Yarrow

Hen and chicks

Sedum

Marigold

Portulaca/Moss rose

Red and purple salvia

Hardy chrysanthemums

Sunflower

As you might expect, I have a wide variety of birds, including mockingbirds, turtledoves, woodpeckers, bluebirds, goldfinches, and hummingbirds, plus butterflies, including endangered Monarchs, four kinds of bees, including endangered earth bumblebees, etc. visiting and living in my yard. I've kept it organic for twenty years now with the help of a compost bin.

My husband has taken over most of the gardening in recent years, as it's become more difficult for me to kneel or sit on the ground to work. Consequently, this loss of our garden is hitting him even harder than it is me. In our new much smaller space, we'll become potagers, as the French would put it—people who garden in pots. I've promised my husband that he can take as many plants to the new house as he is willing to dig and plant in big pots. Of course, he won't be able to dig up and take everything. There simply won't be time or energy for that. So he'll have to decide what he most wants to save from our old gardens.

One of the advantages of this new kind of gardening will be that I'm able to join in gardening again, because I can sit in a chair and work with the plants in the big pots. I'm truly looking forward to that. I have missed the joy and peace of working in the soil. Nonetheless, I'm grieving for our gardens that must be left behind and later destroyed, not as hard as my husband is, but certainly grieving still. I remind my husband and myself that we will still have a garden and lovely blooms, fragrant foliage, and useful herbs in the new place. But it's hard to leave what's been a labor of love for so many years.

Have you ever had to leave a garden behind? How did you handle it?

Linda Rodriguez's Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear December 19, 2017. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Unpacking Boxes and Stories

That sound you heard last week was me weeping. Finally, it was time to say farewell to Musty Manor, my glorious tumbledown seaside rental. It was a bit easier with the ceiling over our bed crumbling, but still, I didn’t know how deeply a person could love a house until I moved into the Manor. Sometimes love isn’t rational.

The good news is we found a house we really like. For now, I’m calling it Eunice’s House after the lady who lived there for close to thirty years. That’s what the neighbors call it, but eventually its real name will reveal itself to me.

Eunice’s House couldn’t be more different than Musty Manor, that charming oceanfront cottage built in the 1920s. Eunice’s house is a midcentury modern open plan ranch. One room flows into the other.  There are lots of windows – that’s similar to Musty Manor -- Oh, that’s right. I’ve moved on. No comparing. Ahem. There’s a nice deck and off the deck is a little tucked away slate patio surrounded by lots of plants. There are fun little accents and many closets in Eunice’s House.

Did I mention the closets? There are thirteen! Eunice liked her closets. I’m starting to think the name of the house will be Thirteen Closets, much in the way British stately homes were named for their attributes, like Twin Poplars or The Chimneys.

Even though it’s not a big house, it may be too much house for me. Well, the kitchen is anyway. The kitchen is huge! Wasted on me, but my gourmet cook daughter is enjoying it. If I’m being honest, all I need in a kitchen is a teapot and one shelf in the fridge for takeout.

For the past week, I’ve lived in a sea of packing boxes – I felt like Ms. Pacman navigating narrow alleys of cartons. The moving company packers were a creative lot, keeping things interesting by mixing and matching rooms and putting a surprise in several boxes. One box of pots and pans came with a bonus pair of black flip flops.

Writing time has been at a premium. Oh, I’ve thought about writing, and especially about deadlines. (Hyperventilates.) But I have to unpack those boxes.

Have you noticed that the term “unpack” has turned up with a new meaning? Among academics one “unpacks” the themes and threads of a novel. The new definition has moved into other fields. On the news the other day, a reporter said “investigators will work to unpack the killer’s motivation.”

So, I thought, as I unpacked dishes, is writing “packing” a story? Putting in all the things – character, theme, action, dialogue, drama, fun – that I want my reader to enjoy? If so, how do I avoid the black flip flop in the box of kitchenware?

I’ll be thinking of this as I unpack.

Do you have a story to share about moving?

For writers, what do you think is most important in packing your story?

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

I’m not the one moving, and yet it seems as though I’m leaving a piece of myself behind. My ninety-two-year old mother is moving from Greece, New York, a suburb of Rochester, where she has lived since 1959. With the exception of breaks for college (her B.A and Dad’s advanced degrees) she’s been in the Rochester area since 1936. It’s not a move she wants to make, rather one her children decided was necessary to provide her better support.

I called the Rochester area home (with two years out while Dad got his PhD from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. where I learned to talk Southern, y’all) until March 1972 when I moved to New Jersey for my first professional job. I’ve periodically returned to visit my parents and for a couple of high school reunions. However, even a generous count of my time back in town might reach one percent of the 16,000+ days since I left home—not exactly making me a poster child for staying strongly connected with the area.

So why my feeling of loss? I don’t think it has anything to do with people. I still have one sister who lives in the area, so not all family connections are severed. None of my close friends have lived in town since shortly after our college days, so that’s not it.

It’s not an attachment to the old family homestead. My parents sold that decades ago and moved to a condo and sold that ten years ago and moved into independent living. I’ve driven past the house I grew up in. It looks much the same, although the trees are much larger—or missing—and there is nothing there that tugs at my heartstrings.

And it’s not Lake Ontario I miss. We now live on a small inland lake not far from Lake Superior, and I never spent much time on or around the lake in any event.

That only leaves the surrounding landscape.

Driving from Michigan, we cross through Canada and reenter the U.S. at Lewiston, N.Y. Mapping software would have us drive south on interstates to the Thruway (I-90), then drive east, and finally back north. I chose the alternate route of taking NY-104 directly east. It follows a ridge all the way from the Niagara Escarpment well past Rochester. On the north, it quickly drops from the ridge to a plain that runs to Lake Ontario. To the south are the long rolling hills that lead to the Finger Lakes and then down to the Southern Tier.

Apples, pears, and cherry trees still dot the landscape. Fields of wheat, corn, and vegetables now share the landscape with vineyards. There are more fallow fields and fewer dairy cows than there used to be, resulting in more tree lots. The small towns remain much as they were fifty years ago, although many hollowed out by the loss of industry are now making up for the loss by importing commuters to nearby cities.

On our drive through Michigan’s Mitten, we pass through Genesee County. That’s a bit curious because the Genesee River is a major river in New York, not Michigan. Flowing north, it drains a large swathe of Western New York into Lake Ontario through a series of falls in Rochester, the falls that made Rochester the original “Flour City” when upstate New York was the breadbasket of the country. Many town names in that portion of Michigan had been lifted by their settlers from New York, just as many Massachusetts town names were hauled across the sea from native England.

We carry the names from our landscapes with us, a reminder of where we’ve been, what we’ve left behind, perhaps what we wish to recreate. When I close my eyes and reimagine the road trips I’ve taken through the general area in which I grew up, the hills and valleys, rivers and lakes, towns and cities are burned into my memory.

I think I’m sad that I’ll not have a built-in reason to wander the area again. Having written this, I’m now smiling because no matter where I am, it’s the landscape I think of as home.

~ Jim

Three Spoons

Three Spoons                                    

by Warren Bull

My wife, Judy and I moved to Portland, Oregon on Christmas day. The flight was not full and the fare 

was much cheaper than for other days around that date. Since then I have been moving my electronic 

addresses and finances.  I have also been starting my new connections such as at the bank and the 

library. Separating from friends and my writing life is harder. Finding new friends and a new writing 

community will take time.

One thing that did not move is the furniture and possessions that we were told by the moving van 

people would arrive on January 6. Next when the truck was three days late, the moving company staff 

members told us the truck should arrive on the 18^th.  On the 13^th, we got a call saying the driver 

assigned to pick up our load found that his cargo was already overweight. He left our things in the 

warehouse.

We have minimal possessions here, expecting the major shipment to follow us closely. I have three 

pairs of boxers.  We have three spoons. I suppose if I were more philosophical I might be more 

sanguine about it. Ah, for the simple life. But I want my stuff. I want to have comfort in my condo. I 

want to have my keyboard, even if I just plunk out tunes one note at a time. I want my computer with 

the record of my submissions and publications

I don’t want to wash dishes and do laundry every other day. 

The remodelers are also not finished but they have almost completed their work. I’m more relaxed 

about them. I like the workers. What they have completed has been very well done. I might feel the 

same about the movers if they had brought almost everything.

I want more than three spoons.