Moving Day

I was 9 when my parents told me we were moving.

It was the day after Christmas, if I remember right. I was still in my pajamas when they beckoned me and my sister to the kitchen table and delivered the news. I cried for the rest of the day – I’d grown up in that house. It was all I’d known, and I didn’t realize how much I loved it until I knew it was being taken away.

I was never as upset about it as I was the day they told me, but the memory of tear soaked cheeks and pajama-clad knees hugged to my chest on the basement sofa sticks with me to this day.

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They changed the carpet in the family room: white fuzz to dark beige grooves. It still smelled alien weeks later.

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We weren’t allowed in the house sometimes. Other people had to tour it, see the bedroom where my mom read to me, the sunny room where I practiced piano, the den where I played my computer games. Strangers were infiltrating my home.

I wanted them gone. I wanted the white carpet back. I wanted the smell of strangers out of the house. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted. 

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We toured empty houses. One was an hour away. Another, almost as long. I played my Nintendo DS in a barren room as my parents were led around. 

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My mom couldn’t pay as much attention to me as she did before. I didn’t realize that until she told me years later, actually, but one repercussion of it stuck with me for years. My mom needed a way to keep me occupied, so she picked up the animated movie Coraline. I watched it alone at night. A horrifying monster disguised as a mother sewed buttons into eyes and ate children. I was terrified, but my eyes were glued to the screen, the smell of the wrong carpet still insulting my nostrils.

It was four years before I conquered my fear of the Other Mother. I’m still unsettled by button eyes.  

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Out of nowhere, near the end of April, we got the good fortune we needed: someone had made a deal on our house. I was happy, but I was broken up inside. 

My mom had a surprise for me, though.

She drove me to the neighborhood where my piano teacher lived, no more than 10 minutes away, and pulled into the driveway next to her house. She smiled at my initial confusion, then my widened eyes as I realized: this house could be ours. My mom told me that she had had her eye on this house for a while but never told me about it in fear of disappointing me: we had to have a buyer for our home by the end of April in order to make a deal on this house, or we’d lose the chance to buy it. 

The house wasn’t as big. The basement was small, the slats in the wooden floor were too far apart. But it was only five minutes from my school. I would still be with my friends. Things would change, but nothing had to change too much. 

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I was almost 10 and a half when we finally moved into our new house. I still mourn the house I grew up in, sometimes: those stately off-white walls that housed the dearest memories of my childhood, barred from me forever. I still go on zillow.com once in a while and look at the old listing for my home. Well, not my home anymore. Strangers live there now. Even still, every time I look at the photos on the post, I feel a pang in my chest. The photos of that house where my childhood lives, even now. 

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But I’m over it.