Time to Say Goodbye

We're doing our Arizona farewell tour

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I had hoped this week to finish up the second part of Arizona Dreaming, but there simply hasn’t been enough time for me to sit and think it through. What I did write feels like it needs to be almost completely scrapped and re-done, because while I’m telling the story, I feel that I’ve been telling the wrong parts of it. Parts that matter to me, because they’re the bones the meat hangs on, but the meat feels curiously missing.

It’s been hard to get focused. My office is empty and my real computer is already in Virginia, shipped ahead of us with the rest of our office stuff so we can hit the ground running when we arrive. Right now, my two youngest are running around me, yelling, their little voices echoing through an empty house with no furniture to dampen the reverberation. It’s adorable, but the noise of it cancels out all usable thought.

The second of the two ABF trailers we’re using for our move left yesterday, less than half-way full. That, in and of itself, is an impressive feat. When we moved here from our much larger home in New Hampshire, we had two-and-a-quarter 28-foot trailers full of stuff. In the two years we were in our current home here in Scottsdale, we were perpetually getting rid of stuff, but it never stopped feeling too cluttered and too small, so we couldn’t tell we’d reduced it by an entire moving truck and a quarter. The house we’ll be renting in Virginia is a full thousand square feet larger than this one, and has more bedrooms. It’s going to feel like a palace in comparison.

We managed to do all the packing ourselves, but we hired movers for the final loading. So glad we did. I always seem to manage to hurt my ankle around the time we make a move, and this was no exception. A few weeks ago, playing football in the pool with my boys, I jumped to catch a wayward throw and felt my left Achilles tendon make an uncomfortable, burning twang. Within a day or two, I developed some kind of nerve pain in the corresponding knee that makes it impossible for me to kneel on the floor without feeling as though someone has inserted a hot blade on the outside edge of my kneecap. Suffice to say, I can’t just lie around, so I’ve been gimping through 6,000-12,000 steps a day. Even if I wasn’t hurt, there’s little chance, with just the help of my teenage boys, I could have gotten these trucks loaded as well or as efficiently. In the early years of our marriage I always did most of the physical labor of moving myself, but the days of my young man strength and seemingly limitless endurance are decidedly in the rear view.

So now we’re here, in an empty house, strewn with the last accumulated detritus of a family of 9. I’ve got my laptop on a kitchen counter where it barely fits, and I borrowed one of the outdoor barstools that aren’t coming with us so I’d have somewhere to sit. My daughter is peppering me with questions as I type, my toddler needs a diaper change, and my wife is gone for a meeting and won’t be back for a couple of hours. Today is the day for packing the van to head to an AirBnB nearby so we have places to sit and eat and work and sleep. Today we are hoping we don’t find out we have too much “need to bring with us on the trip” stuff. If we do, we’ll need to rent a trailer.

We’re supposed to be driving both cars across country, placing cargo in each, but the Jeep is in the shop and I don’t know when we’ll get it back. I took it in last week for an oil change and tire rotation, and mentioned that we were getting weird intermittent overheating warnings, only for the temperature to drop back down to nominal several seconds later. Turns out, we’d blown the head gasket and didn’t even know. There was never a check engine light, or difficulty starting, or obvious smoke in the exhaust. We were driving around with no idea something was wrong.

Hearing you need a new engine on a vehicle with only 75,000 miles is never a great feeling. The surprisingly good news is, it was covered under our warranty. The bad news is, we have no idea if the repairs will be done before it’s time for us to get on the road. We’re going to be cutting it awfully close, since the engine isn’t scheduled to arrive at the shop until July 29th, and the last day in our local AirBnB is the 31st.

From now until then, it’s all about cleaning and repairing and selling any leftover furniture we decided not to bring. And hopefully, some down time to have some fun, see our friends, and say our goodbyes.

I’m struggling mightily with leaving the West Coast. I’m excited to make a change, since the past couple years have felt like an endless succession of problems and struggle, but I have no sense at all about what’s to come. Jamie continues to feel a strong intuition that we need to go, and go quickly. Even though we all wanted to take the long way, and take the kids to see some national parks they haven’t seen, something is telling her to just go. Make a beeline. We don’t know why. But this entire move has been intuition-driven. I suppose we’ll make our final decision on that at last minute. It’s hard to pass up an opportunity for a family memory-making trip we may not get to make again any time soon based only on some vague feelings of urgency. But I’ve always advocated listening to those little whispers, and I’m not about to change that philosophy now.

Hopefully, sometime in these last five days we have in Arizona, I’ll find some time to finish writing out my reflections about the place.

Until then, I’ve got too many distractions — my kids are eating waffles and singing the Rickroll song out loud just a few feet away from me, when the baby isn’t crying or asking me to endlessly re-load his single-shot nerf gun — and no place to sit and think. And now Eli just dropped his waffle and can’t pick it up, because apparently the floor is lava.

I’ll be in touch soon.