The Movement of Moving

The dust has settled and it feels like there is so much of it, as if it were rising in drifts up to my knees.  I am tripping over boxes, bags filled with off season clothes, suitcases half emptied because I have not decided what to unpack into. 

I have always been about movement – when I have something to say, I gesture, move, pantomime. In crisis I seek ways to move the energy, release negative and overwhelming feelings that are coursing through my body, mind and spirit.  I hate being stuck and while most of the past seven years have demonstrated steady movement, there is a part of me that was glued in place. Now, prying and wrenching, discarding and tossing, gathering and grumbling, I have moved.

The old place was a cocoon, dark and embracing. Nestled into a hill and facing north, its eyes were hooded with shades to keep out the chill. Even when they were rolled up, only dim light came in to the family room, the place we spent a lot of time. The living room was brighter but for some reason we did not use this room as much.  The kitchen had big windows, looking out on the hill and the fern forest in spring and summer, shaded by a black walnut tree and desiccated cedars, one of which hosts a swarm of bees. The new tenants are city folk and are concerned: will their son run into the road? Will the bees chase him?  "Just don't throw things at the bee hive," I advise, in my best country girl, nonchalant manner. 

In contrast, this house floods with light from early dawn till dusk. It is quieter here. At the old place, there was constant lawn mowing as if the neighbors were members of a secret competitive club, with a prize for how often one could mow. Red tractors, green ones, stand on the back mowers, which the neighbor across the street used while wearing a black back brace around his plaid shirt. My own John Deere stopped working years ago and the new lawn guy wears an acid green tee shirt as he walks behind his orange mower, delivered in a horse trailer.  At the new place, I have yet to hear anything more than birdsong, frogs and the cicadas right now, signaling another searingly hot day. Maybe the lawns are mowed by pookahs silently in the middle of the night. I have to admit it is pretty here. The deck is bordered by a small pond with pink water lilies tucked under a straggly wild blackberry bush. The land in back includes more than 50 acres of forest, wetland, hill and glen, with lovely mossy paths and tenacious trees growing out of granite cracks.

I took the long road home last night, winding around an old country highway, over the Bear Mountain Bridge. I drove past the road I lived on growing up, past the park where we'd go to see the bear cubs. It took me through the town where my eldest went to nursery school, past the turn off to our first house. It was as if I were moving through remnants of the past as I drove to the present.  Along with the boxes, pots and pans, my collection of colored crackle glass, hundreds of books, records and cds, I have moved with memories, carrying them in my heart, into this place of light and hopefully, new possibilities.