Snow Sunday: Moving Out of Town

06 Feb Snow Sunday: Moving Out of Town

Moving day

My cold arrived the same day that the moving boxes arrived. Of course it did. It made sense in some kind of perverse world order that at the same time that I was that packing up the home that had sheltered my family for the past 12 years that I was also unpacking the contents of my entire sinus system into tissues and flinging them at will around the house.

Except I didn’t want to be in such a state. I had already fretted about this move for years. Already tried to brainstorm creative loans that might let us buy out the other family members who owned the house. Already shed too many tears about leaving behind the house I’d carried both of my newborn girls into. The kitchen island where I’d written and sold my first article. The dining room in which countless friends had gathered for meals crafted by my husband’s hands. Nothing about the move was changing.

And by all accounts, we’d found a great house in Lawson Hill. We were surrounded by friends on two sides; surrounded by a creek and a set of woods on the other. We could walk to our jobs at the Telluride Mountain School.

Besides, I was tough. I’d been raised in a house that routinely tamped down any crisis, big or small, by proclaiming, “At least, it’s not cancer!” (I’m not kidding: The first time an injury of mine got any attention was when I was 16, shattered my leg, and a team of doctors had to rebuild it with a rod and pins.) So who was I to be blowing my nose over a move?

View from the new house

After all, I was still “living the dream.”

Still minutes from a ski hill, an ice rink, a skate ski path.

Still looking up the impossibly beautiful San Juan Mountains every morning.

Still doing the things in my life that mattered: writing, teaching, and raising a family with a man I adored.

And yet.

The mind can say all the right things and the heart will still break. I was moving. Leaving behind the friends in town who would throw snowballs at the window when they saw we were up late working. Leaving behind my quick run up Bear Creek and my bike ride to the post office. Leaving behind the sound of the San Miguel River when it would swell in the spring, the sound of Bluegrass music drifting from town park to my open skylight.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost once said in, “The Mending Wall,” a poem very much about how the world bucks any logic we try to place on it. No matter how many times we profess a fence is logical, the frozen ground swell sends the wall’s stones flying. Likewise, no matter how much I say the move is fine, there is another part of me that doesn’t agree. At least not yet. Not until I find a new set of things to fall in love with in my new home.