Three years, nearly, we’ve been here in this cabin on the lake. The place we found refuge as our life fell apart. A place I grew up visiting, playing on the dock as my dad baited his fishing hook with worms. Where we played Pictionary with kerosene lamps down by the water, before there was even a cabin here. We have a long history, me and this place.
But it's bittersweet, for our presence here was born out of trauma. We left the home we owned suddenly, faced with what we called a "house nightmare" — a problem with no quick and easy solution. Unfair, unlucky, whatever you want to call it, but it was our lot and we had no choice but to accept it. The easiest way out was to drop some cash and fix the problem, then sell the house, recover the money, and move onto our forever home. The right choice, but the wrong time — it wasn't supposed to happen this way. It was supposed to be planned and measured. Not chaotic and desperate. Not in a pandemic with record low housing inventory and grift everywhere.
And then, time. Time passing before our eyes. Time to find the right property, time to find a builder, time to build a house. Cynicism ran through my veins — I believed we had already been priced out of the market. I relied on Cody's faith in this plan to carry both of us.
And now that plan is finally coming to fruition. I came here with a bruised and battered heart, hoping to heal from losing my first pregnancy. Not knowing if we could ever have a child. Astonishingly, my baby is now a toddler. My property has a foundation. Contractors are suddenly replying. Work is getting done. I am packing boxes.
I am happy to finally be moving again, but it's still a hard transition. It's probably because of the trauma of our last move — if you can call abandoning your home 6 months after moving into it a "move." Haphazardly dumping our life's collection of things into boxes and then dragging those into storage units (first one, then a second after the first was full), a POD, and here to the now hoarder-level cabin basement wasn't moving in the traditional sense: it was "undoing."
Undoing all the clever and organized systems we had developed at the farmhouse. Undoing the neat and tidy long term storage I had created in the barn -- the project I busied myself with after my first miscarriage. Undoing the beautifully ordered kitchen drawers I had perfected, the ideal work triangle I used to bake bread and make sauerkraut. Undoing progress. Undoing our lives as we knew them.
Now I balance Alice's tray on top of a fruit basket and stack dirty cutting boards on top of one another in this tiny kitchen that is packed with jars and boxes and bananas and avocados, and in which I lose something at least once a week.
When Alice was first born it was, as people tell you, like a bomb exploded in our lives for many months. There was no time or energy to break down recycling, of which there was an abundance from all the baby stuff we bought. Then the trash company decided the private road around the lake was too poorly maintained and dropped us as customers, so it sat out all winter, congealing and growing algae. Living on the north side of a lake you need only leave something outside for a few days before it develops the slimy coating of a fish tank — one of a few realities of full-time life here that grates on you but can't complain about because this place saved you and gave you a home.
After the snow melted in the spring, I stared at that recycling pile with derision. "We're like a goddamn Gray Gardens," I whispered under my breath one day as I dragged a trash bag outside.
From the day we arrived I have had a gnawing dread at moving from here. Cody reminds me often that despite our shared hatred of the process, we'll be moving to our forever home on our very own land, with enough space for both baby and beasts, and will finally be reunited with our own possessions — clothes I haven't worn in years, books, the missing kitchen gadgets (like the cherry pitter, which I think of longingly whenever I mangle cherries with a paring knife as Alice screams). He's right of course, but still there's a crushing fatigue as I stare at boxes upon boxes in the basement, imagining how many trips it will take to get things from here to there, and how many months it will take to unpack them all with a baby who wants to be in my arms most minutes of the day.
I've started preparing for the move during Alice's morning nap. First I labeled boxes in the basement with their room destination — "kitchen", "dining room", "bedroom #1". Even though it's a task I desperately want to be doing, I still feel a rising stress as I do it -- mainly because it involves confronting that messy "undoing" of our lives that happened to get here. Nothing is how I would've done it if we had more time to plan -- piles of disordered boxes, and within them more often than not a mishmash of disconnected items. In one, a folder of old bills, an ice cream scoop, a set of winter gloves. It must have been what was on my old kitchen counter.
The labeling project isn't really realistic; It doesn't really matter where these boxes go. There's no way around that years-old debt. I know we'll be hand picking through those boxes months after we move.
Last week I started tackling a different aspect of the move: undoing our presence on the property over the last few years.
We came here as ex-farmers, previously owning a four acre property. Tractor implements (sans tractor, which sits on our new property) litter the yard here, and chicken feeders and stock tanks sit stashed under the deck. Nothing really had a "place" here, so it got dropped where it could go.
I had even more dread for this endeavor than the basement box labeling project, I think due to lingering guilt at just how long we've been here and a general feeling of disorder. I was always house proud at the old house — we spent months cleaning up what was an abandoned farm, clearing brush and vines and throwing out trash from the barn. Here, we've been living among a combination of existing furnishings and carelessly shlepped possessions and that makes me feel like an agent of chaos, of mess.
I want to make places better, not worse. Gray Gardens, I mutter.
The last of our chickens died in the Spring — scooped up by a neighbor's roaming dog, a sadly expected turn of events given the preponderance of weekender neighbors sailing in from sub/urbia, determined to cosplay rural life for a day. It's sad to feel the absence of the gentle squacks and coos I became so accustomed to hearing throughout the day, but I've made peace with it in time, reminding myself that they had a good life here — especially given the circumstances. One day soon we'll have chickens again, I tell myself.
We kept the birds on the side of the house, in a ramshackle wire fence held together with cheap step-in posts, the kind you use for electric fencing. In the last few months woody brambles grew up in it. Cody took a weekend to clean out and dismantle the old temporary coop, which now sits in the sun ready to be moved to the new property. Last weekend, I started using Alice's morning nap to clear brush around that part of the yard.
It's the kind of task that could be done effortlessly in minutes with a tractor, but ours is already sited in its forever-home miles away and it seemed silly to transport it back here for a few chores. So instead I attacked it with a hatchet and clippers and elbow grease. First it was a little sad, happening upon bird feathers from my old flock. But then I started to remember what it felt like to live our old farm life. To be outside more than inside. The conditions weren't right here to do any serious gardening, and even my fruit bushes have had mixed success. But that doesn't change the simple pleasure of being outside. I had forgotten how much I loved it — both the quiet meditation of manual labor and the little incidental things you see, like efts and tree frogs hopping in the grass, or the first rusty maple leaf of autumn. Like so much of life, you have to be present and available to catch special moments. You can't expect to manifest them when they are convenient to you.
I'm surprised at how quickly the undoing is progressing. I swept out the seldom-used gazebo by the water and took a moment to appreciate its beauty. I clipped the tendrils of vines and thickets of brush by the dock and boats, stopping to remember the summer we paddled kayaks nearly every evening after work. It's an important lesson for me, who is prone to shame about "mistakes" or "ruining things." The opposite of pride isn't shame, it's resolve: resolve to restore and improve that which has become worn. To mend, to fix. Looking out into the yard from the freshly scrubbed deck, I feel a sense of peace that has been missing for a long, long time.
In a few months, this place will be as it was again — a beautiful view, a weekend refuge, a backdrop for bonfires and barbecues. A place where people come to ride boats and enjoy the cool, damp air of a lakeside morning.
It won't be our home anymore. But it will always be the place where I became a mother, and where my daughter grew from a tiny newborn into a toddler. Where we hustled and followed our dream, and made it happen.
It's a debt I can never truly repay.
This essay made me cry, first because of your tenderness in describing these complicated feelings of grief and transition in your own personal journey, and second because of the universality of these kinds of feelings and how often we try to deny them or push them away. I so relate to the feelings of shame, confusion, and loss when things don’t happen the way you’ve envisioned and the duality of feeling irritated/trapped by the very things that saved you. Gratitude and guilt live together more often than we like to admit, and we all experience times of having to unearth the past and face up to the pain and regret that gets intrinsically embedded into life at those moments when we “do what we gotta do” to survive. You write, “The opposite of pride isn't shame, it's resolve: resolve to restore and improve that which has become worn. To mend, to fix.” I’m in a season of mending in my life and am grateful to you for this reminder that hope is there to be found, in nature, in our most cherished relationships, and in the act of being brave enough to change, even when it hurts like hell. Thank you for this, your writing goes straight to my heart every time.
The process of moving is such an emotional (and physical) one! My husband and I recently relocated out of state with a 14 month old and I can relate to so much to the overwhelm, regret, and hope. My Dad passed away in 2020 and as the keeper of his belongings, sorting through those boxes again was my biggest dread. I went slowly but surely (it’s amazing what can be done during baby’s nap times!) and was amazed when somehow everything got done.
We’re still getting settled in here and the culture shock of living in the south as opposed to the Midwest is starting to set in. We also realized this week that because of his work visa, my husband will have to go back to our old city for six weeks, leaving the baby and dog and I told hold down the fort here.
Moving is so complicated but I think there are a lot of lessons ripe for the plucking and if we make an effort, a lot of integration and healing, too.
Wishing you the best on your move! 💗