At 4am last night I crawled into bed on the floor of the new house. It took me a minute to find everyone, tip-toeing through the empty rooms to where they were tucked away. The back bedroom a puzzle of bare mattresses wedged wall-to-wall and Eloise asleep in her underwear, wrapped in a mattress pad breathing softly, her face and feet dirty from the yard.
It felt like days since I’d seen my own children, the past few weeks spent slipping away to paint the walls of the new place and scrub the bathtub we were leaving behind. To fill endless trash bags of broken toys strewn in every corner of the yard while Gabriel slept in the baby swing under the juniper tree. To pick pennies and bits of crayon out of the carpet that had not survived three years and four small children.
And now after one last day of straightening up the property I was driving away from 1337 Ames Street for the last time. The window rolled down, the last pieces of stray furniture strapped to the roof of the car. The road out of town reminding me of so many times picking up and moving.
I am fighting back a flood of tears. I am suddenly panicked, a knot in my chest. Is it strange to say I will miss this part of town? This scrappy, unkempt corner of the city that feels like home.
What is it I am scared of losing?
The wobbly gait of an old man with a plastic shopping bag wandering down our street.
The woman who hides her cardboard box of belongings in the alley behind our house.
The sound of the Mexican popsicle man, stopping to ring his bell at the gate of our chain-link fence.
A laundry mat, a city bus stop and a 7-11 all within walking distance of my front door.
Stepping outside on a hot summer evening to hear a grandmother across the street yelling at her kids.
The reminder that I’m not the only one lacking perfection in their lives.
And there’s the fear of losing a small bit of simplicity. Some undefined sense of freedom that comes with living in a dilapidated rental with thrift-store furniture and everything painted red and sky-blue and sage green.
It feels like betrayal to admit I have laid in bed at night lamenting the fact that I am sleeping with a baby in a bed meant for our toddler. Lamenting the unfinished drywall and scuffed up linoleum, the strip of duct-tape holding down the edge of the living room carpet, the bare lightbulb hanging in the kitchen hallway. And wishing for a house that didn’t feel crowded and chaotic, threadbare and outgrown.
But now it is happening and I am not wanting to let go. In the new house, will I sit in a rust-colored velvet chair on the porch while my kids dig holes in the front lawn? Will there be rogue marker drawings on the living room wall and star wars stickers on the front door? Will there be a couch in the yard and delinquent neighborhood kids showing up for hours without their parent’s permission? Will my kids not pee in the yard when the bathroom is being used by someone else?
These past few years are poignantly significant in all their details - Julian’s floundering first steps across the living room carpet as we cheered him on. Running barefoot out to the street on Moses’s first day of kindergarten to watch him wave proudly out the back window of the Volvo. The concrete floor of the front porch that was covered in bamboo mats and flooded every time it rained. Washing the dishes as Eloise and Julian crouched on their heels outside the kitchen door, studying a millipede, searching for rolly pollies under the rocks that I was constantly moving back into place. Hanging the laundry out to dry on the electrical wires stapled over the front door that stayed open all summer. It’s peeling paint and grubby handprints. The birds in the yard coexisting with the cars on Sheridan, an ambulance on Colfax, the heavy bass of a neighbors truck, traffic that sounds like a drag race.
Mostly, I am afraid that my children won’t remember any of this. That they won’t remember a time when we all shared one bedroom, when they didn’t even know that they were supposed to have their own beds, their own rooms. Maybe they’ll carry with them a hazy sense of a memory, like a large juniper tree with a smooth patch of dirt underneath an old swing. A small bedroom with multiple layers of colorful carpets. Cradling a rolly polly outside the kitchen door.
It is the last evening on Ames street - always so beautiful the way the sun set behind the house and the front yard bathed in shafts of light, turning a small concrete block house into a mecca of heaven. The baby is strapped into the carseat amidst walls of belongings. I am sweaty and hot and exhausted and I am driving way from the first home my children might actually remember.
Turning onto 36 the sun is setting over the foothills turning their outline to purple, blue, then gold. A ray of light shoots up to the sky like some love letter from God, reminding me: The sun sets here too. Nothing is lost. Beauty goes with you wherever you go. My fear turns to awe, there are tears in my eyes. And then over the horizon, a new place we will call home.
