Moving On Is Hard To Do.

Moving always makes me feel sentimental.

And helter skelter.  Out of whack.

Upside down.

It’s such an obvious transition.

Such an unavoidable Before and After moment.

A time when you are forced to notice and evaluate your possessions. The sum of your life’s collection of stuff.

Every drawer to pack and shift reveals old memories, bits and pieces of days and decades past, like so much driftwood.

Yesterday, in an old china cabinet that once belonged to my father’s mother, I found a little stack of papers that I probably moved from Virginia over four years ago and haven’t peered upon since.   An anniversary card from my mom to Kevin and I.  A tiny red construction paper hand with my own name scrawled across the wrist and the year 1978 scratched along with it in crayon.

And I was reminded that I have been loved.  I have been cherished.  My hand size was something to marvel at and someone thought it sweet enough to save, through multiple moves and dancing down to me through so much time.

In any home, with any change, there is always something to miss.  

Always with the bittersweet.   Again and again.

The stream that saw our children flit back and forth nearly every summer afternoon for four summers.  The house to which we carried our Otto Fox home from the hospital.  The kitchen that has hosted countless Survivor dinners.  Summer staffers painting their names on the closet door.  The loft beds lovingly crafted by Jeff just for our wee ones.

There are so many pleasant memories we have made at this house. Such precious moments.

And yet, that isn’t all.

One side is never everything.  One picture never tells the whole story.

There are memories here, moments here, that I cannot race away from fast enough. Pieces of me and pieces of my marriage that died here and that I would prefer to have stay buried here.

There’s no separating it though.  Not really.

It’s like life.

Always the juxtaposition of both the good and the bad.   The high and the low.   The peace and the chaos.

And this is why moving is such hard work.

Such heartbreakingly difficult, surreal, overwhelming hard work.