Skipping Town

I ask you: is there anything more invasive and disruptive than a move? Each day has been a blur of boxes, or unboxed piles of miscellany, or haphazardly shelved and stored items that may never return to the pleasingly organized state they'd once been in. The work is physically exhausting. This house is large, the boxes heavy, and there is a lot of brute hauling and pushing and relocating. Every day is like a demonic version of a cross-fit workout. (That comparison is Andrew's. I have no idea what a cross-fit workout entails, or even how to write out "cross-fit": Cross Fit, CrossFit, crossfit, Crossfit, Cross/Fit?) Over the past week and a half, I've laid hands on every single one of my belongings, from unmatchable lids of old sour cream containers to a pile of maternity clothes I've never been able to part with to my most treasured tiny things. I've never been this familiar with all the noise and clutter of my life. There are no mysteries to my home right ...

It's a week of endings and beginnings. I was supposed to be in New Jersey today, overseeing movers and officially bidding farewell to our house; but it was not to be. This has been a very poorly timed, convoluted, logistically complex move, and we'd made a complicated plan to pull it off--and you know the saying: Want to make God laugh? Make a plan.  Or something like that. And so it was. A death in our family meant my parents could no longer stay with the kids this week, which meant I could not go to New Jersey, which meant Andrew is now tying up the ends of our life himself.   Life happens. Endings and beginnings are rarely separate. Maybe never. The mess and misery of a move are temporary, inconsequential. Though it's a sad time for my family, it's also a time of new beginnings, and we're getting there, day by day.  The movers packed up our Maplewood house yesterday with Andrew overseeing, while I greeted--at long last!--our POD here in Pittsburgh. I was overjoye...

HELLO! We’ve been without WiFi this week, and I haven’t been able to post. A lot has happened. Rather, a lot HASN’T happened. I wrote a few updates this week even though I couldn’t post them, and they are below. Tuesday, 9/8/20 We spent last week with my parents, anticipating that we’d move into our new house on Saturday 9/5, when we’d greet our arriving POD and be reunited with at least some of our things. This was not to be. When I called PODS on Friday 9/4, nervous because I hadn’t yet received a call about a delivery time, I learned that our POD was still in New Jersey, and that there was no delivery date scheduled. There was a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth, but there was no way to compel PODS to magically transport a giant storage container overnight, so we were stuck. We decided to move in anyway and just...wing it. We borrowed cots, an inflatable mattress, folding chairs, and a card table from my parents, and on Saturday Andrew and I drove around Pittsburgh, pickin...

It’s been a week. After our emotional goodbye on Saturday, we drove to Pennsylvania and got ready to launch our new life. On Monday, we had a final walk-through of the house and signed the documents to make it ours. Is there any stranger feeling than being alone for the first time in a new house that you OWN? Once the realtors and title guy left, we looked around in amazement and glee. “Glee” wasn’t guaranteed. After all, we hadn’t seen the house since July and had been scared silly by the inspection report (TL/DR: “This is an old house. Hope you like projects. Good luck.”). The length and detail of this report nearly made us SELECT ALL / DELETE the whole new-life endeavor. But standing there, keys in hand, we loved it just as much as we had back when we made the offer in the first place. Whew. We met with a plumber on Monday, and on Wednesday I met with an environmental remediation guy we’d hired to remove the cat-toxic carpet in the (finished) basement and remediate the cat-toxic sme...

In a few hours, we'll drive away from 25 Hickory. Some thoughts. *** In 2012, on the cusp of our move from Brooklyn to New Jersey, I wrote a heartbroken goodbye letter to New York City. It was the end of a chapter, a long, topsy turvy chapter that shaped me and set me on the path of the rest of my life. Though I’d left before, for a four-year stint in Barcelona and California, I knew I’d go back, and I did , baby Lucia in tow. Then Greta came along. That’s when the city I loved almost broke me: two under two, in a small apartment with no yard, was a calculation that didn’t work. So we packed up and moved to the burbs, in what has now become a cliched migration from Brooklyn to Maplewood, a place that realtors, unfortunately, relentlessly market as “Brooklyn West.” And we were happy. We found a fixer-upper on one of Maplewood’s most beautiful streets, a house that was not done in any way but had the soul and the space we were looking for. We were the only offer, and we made a low o...

Today was as insane as you'd expect. Besides the expected packing of the car and POD, we also were surprised to learn that, before 4:30pm, we had to: Buy and install all new smoke detectors Buy and install two fire extinguishers Submit and pay for a Certificate of Continued Occupancy at the town hall Submit and pay for a fire safety compliance certificate at the fire department Get a form notarized before submitting to the fire department Photograph all newly installed smoke detectors and extinguishers, turn into a PDF doc, and email to...someone (Andrew did this) Wire the down payment More time-intensive and arduous than all this was draining, washing, and disassembling our inflatable pool setup. We set up two hoses to siphon out the water, but this was very very slow, so the kids got in the pool and stepped on the sides to drain it faster. Once the water was out, we had to pick up all the foam tiles that formed its platform. In the meantime, it was raining hard, so everything bec...

The buyers' inspection was today, so in the morning we all loaded ourselves into the car and headed into the city for one last visit. It was our first time there since February (me and the girls) and March (Andrew), and we were glad to see so much normalcy--lots of traffic on the streets, people walking, sidewalk seating outside restaurants, shops open. We'd assumed parking would be easy; we were wrong. But we found a spot on Columbus and ate bagels on a bench outside the Natural History Museum. Then Andrew took Farrah into the park and the girls and I went into Flying Tiger for some notebooks and other things. Then we drove to the Muji near Bryant Park and bought, in all, 22 notebooks. (The Muji five-packs are my favorite, and we stocked up.)  We thought about having lunch in Bryant Park, but we couldn't find a place to park, so we just headed home. We drove past shuttered theaters. We talked about what we'd see when Broadway reopens. We decided, when we visit, we'...

Departure week continues. More goodbyes with friends last night. Yesterday L&G played with the girls across the street, and today L&G had an all-day (masked) playdate with all the neighbor kids, running feral from yard to yard with a gang that ranged from first grade through fifth. They played games, ran around, swung, bought ice cream from the ice cream truck. They didn't come home until 7:00pm. It was exactly the kind of suburban summer day we imagined long ago. And, of course, we're leaving right when the kids can start playing together after the long spring. We should have FORBIDDEN them to play this week just so we could have had an easier departure. Alas. Today we got some surprising news: the girls will be going to school in-person on September 8 (Lucia) and September 10 (Greta), instead of the originally planned end of September. All the things I'd put off doing, thinking I had several weeks, I suddenly had to do--most crucially, order uniforms and masks. I ...

 At some point, we have to just lock up the POD, get in the car, and go. These days leading up to our departure are frenzied and also, on some level, unnecessary; we're paying for full-service moving, which is a lovely thing in theory, but I'm way too much of a control freak to simply leave the house as-is and let the movers pack it all up. There are things I want to pack up myself, things I want to have with me in the car, things I don't trust anyone to handle with enough care. I also like my boxes to make sense, for easier unpacking. So it turns out I've managed to pack up almost everything except our dishware, linens, small appliances, most of the books, and holiday decorations (which, actually, are already packed in bins, so...).  WARNING: This is the moment when there's a risk that I'll consider cancelling the full-service movers, because "I've packed almost everything already." Eight years ago, after doing a ton of packing, I did actually can...

Yesterday continued the wave of goodbyes, with a neighbor-hosted gathering of all our wonderful friends on Hickory Drive. We lucked into this street eight years ago, and I fear no other street will ever compare. Good neighbors are no small thing. We spent many restless hours wondering, yet again, if this is all a Very Big Mistake. (Too late nooowwwwwww....) We spent today doing more prepartions: loading firewood into the POD (the moving company won't take firewood), doing more garage cleanout to build our trash pile, packing up a few more things to go into the POD. Very soon, everything is going to be in limbo. We'll take some things with us in our car; more things will join us a week later in the POD; the rest will come two weeks after that in the moving truck. It's a process. I'm trying to be calmly accepting of the fact that it'll be at least a month before I know where anything is, but I know I'll have a breakdown over this at some point, when I can't fi...

It's real now. No turning back. We sold our house in one day, without it ever going on the market. This is a huge relief, and also a forcing factor because now we really can't change our minds. Ha! Not that we were going to! But now we really really can't. We're locked in. We're leaving. We're leaving in one week. The kids are now forced to face that reality too. Their friends are away on vacations or leaving for vacations, so yesterday involved a lot of goodbyes and a lot of hysterical tears. I felt yesterday like I'd ruined a lot of tween lives. It is not a good feeling. WHAT ARE WE DOING? Per the contract of our marriage (ie only one of us is allowed to freak out at a time), Andrew is calm and steady, reassuring me that this is not a mistake, that this is something we'd been talking about for a long time, that we're going to be happy and the kids will be happy, and also here's a spreadsheet with conditional formatting about all the great thing...

Wow , you've probably been thinking the past couple of months. Those Littells are ON FIRE with cleaning out their house . And we have been! We've excavated every last space. Eight years of stuff. We were relentless. It's not easy for me to get rid of things but even I was ruthless, driven by quarantine to dive into this project and see it through. And yet. I haven’t been totally forthcoming on this blog. The thing is, even as we were cleaning in a kind of quarantine fit, as many people were, we were also having constant conversations addressing a single, urgent question: Is it time to move? Moving away from New Jersey, likely to Pittsburgh, was always the longish-term plan. There would be work hurdles, and school hurdles, and entrenched-in-familiar-routines hurdles, so it was never something we’d seriously considered. We knew we would consider it; we just didn’t know when. Sometimes we thought we’d start talking about it when Lucia was about to enter middle school, a point ...

Lucia has handled this move with surprising aplomb so far. She was mellow and fun during the move; thought all the craziness and mess was funny; and really just went along with things with nary a complaint. (Much of this is due, of course, to the fact that my parents’ sole job was to entertain both girls nonstop for an entire week. They excelled at their task.) But now that Grandma and Pop-Pop have left, and Andrew has gone back to work, and it’s just us here in this strange new home, Lucia has moments of homesickness. Sometimes it strikes when we’re doing something she enjoys, like painting rocks; sometimes it’s when we’re playing; sometimes it’s when we’re reading books or doing some other quiet thing. “I want to go home,” she’ll say suddenly. “We are home,” I say. “This is our new house.” “No,” she’ll say. “I want to go home—my regular home.” It is so sad. I tell her that I miss it too, and that it’s hard to say goodbye and move to a new place, but soon we’ll love our new h...

We’re here, and so is all our stuff, and if you were with us for the past few days, you’d understand that this is no small accomplishment. The past week has been a blur. Last Monday, Andrew and I went to the bank and got a certified check for the closing costs and the balance of our down payment. On the way home from the bank, we decided maybe we’d better hoard what little cash we had left—so we decided to cancel our movers. Mom and Dad thought we were insane, but the more we considered it, the more reasonable an idea it seemed. Plus, people who’d just moved into the top floor of our brownstone offered to give us all their boxes. It seemed like it was meant to be. Tuesday, we headed into NJ for the closing, an intense two hours of signature upon signature. That morning, we canceled the movers but did arrange for another moving company to do the actual truck loading, driving, and unloading. When we got home, we started packing. Wednesday, we continued packing. For fifteen ho...

I've always loved the poem "Autumn Perspective" by Erica Jong. It's on my mind every day now as we settle into our new home. Here it is: Autumn Perspective Now, moving in, cartons on the floor, the radio playing to bare walls, picture hooks left stranded in the unsoiled squares where paintings were, and something reminding us this is like all other moving days; finding the dirty ends of someone else’s life, hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit, and burned-out matches in the corner; things not preserved, yet never swept away like fragments of disturbing dreams we stumble on all day . . . in ordering our lives, we will discard them, scrub clean the floorboards of this our home lest refuse from the lives we did not lead become, in some strange, frightening way, our own. And we have plans that will not tolerate our fears--a year laid out like rooms in a new house--the dusty wine glasses rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves sagging with heavy winter books. ...

This weekend, Mom and Dad came for a quick visit, and we were fortunate enough to be able to arrange to show them our new house. Andrew and I were so excited for the trip—we hadn’t visited the house for many weeks, and no one besides us had seen it yet. We were anxious to show it off, and eager to hear confirmation that we’d made the right choice. When we arrived at the house on Saturday morning, our broker wasn’t yet there, but cars were in the driveway. People approached us: the owner’s daughter, son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. They were at the house to do some work and packing and hadn’t known we were coming. It felt like an illicit meeting, pre-closing: should our lawyers have been present? were we trespassing? There is something inherently odd about the process of turning a house over to a new family, particularly when the house in question has been lived in by one family for so many years. Even if selling is the right or only thing to do (as it seems to be in this case, ...