Today all our worldly belongings were packed into boxes which terrified our youngest daughters. They simply could not stand it, so the children and I visited some friends while the professional packers from the moving company packed like fiends. Everything in the house disappeared quickly and orderly into scores of brown cardboard boxes. It was a strange feeling popping back in the house for a minute when I came back to my husband and two oldest children who stayed to supervise. It didn't seem like home at all, it was somehow vacant and empty in a way that went deeper than the mere absence of possessions. It was our home yesterday and today it just wasn't.
We feel so homeless; we are a people without a place. All those relationships to places and people and things that we so carefully constructed over the years are being snipped. One by one we break these threads and watch them fall away. The last time at dance, the last time we see that friend, the last Mass at our parish, the last goodbye to this neighbor. Snip, snip, snip.What we are left with is this strange floating feeling as the home we are leaving is no longer home and the home we are going to is not yet home. When we get to Michigan it will be completely new to me and the kid. Not that we have never been but that we have never built up this web of relationships yet. My husband was born there but has been living elsewhere for many years and so while it is still a homecoming for him, it will be work to pick up all those all threads that he cut before. Until we build up our web, we will still be homeless.
My dear, dear friend Hanna made her famous peanut butter cookies for us and carefully packed them for our trip. As we left her house I looked at those cookies and I cried. Seeing my broken cookie made me feel like my heart was breaking. I have her email, her cell number, her cookie recipe but I won't have her. Snip, snip, snip...and I watch those threads that held my family in place dropping. It's a wonderful opportunity for us to move to the farm, for the kids to be able to run in the woods and to really know their father's family. It's a gift and all gifts come with a price. Sometimes the price is difficult to bear. As we drove to my mother's to spend the night I looked and my cookie and thought of my echoing and empty home and I cried. It is not that I did expect it to be hard, it was that I embraced that difficulty. I know that soon we will feel at home and not so adrift; it is not that I am not hopeful. It is that I truly understand the price that we are paying.
The people and places we leave behind are beautiful gifts as well and they are worth grieving. The pain in leaving them behind will make visiting them so, so much sweeter.
The people and places we leave behind are beautiful gifts as well and they are worth grieving. The pain in leaving them behind will make visiting them so, so much sweeter.







