A Year Ago...

April 14, 2010

A year ago, we were in mourning. We had entered that stage of relocation know to my children as "the last time we'll ever…" It was the last Boston Marathon we would watch from the street in front of the Catholic Church in the center of town. It was the last April vacation we'd spend with friends in our house in Pennsylvania. It was the last time they would watch me wander around the yard yelling for them to Come And See whatever tiny little perennial was starting to climb out of the newly unfrozen ground. It was brutal.

The children and I had been living in limbo for nearly nine months at this point. We knew we were leaving. We knew, most likely, when we were leaving. Still, the actual process of saying goodbye and driving away had only recently become REAL. The house was on the market, freshly updated and staged to look appealing to the five people in the world who might be in the market for a house in the suburbs of Boston during the real estate crash. We had become expert at what was referred to as "fifteen minute fade". Quick – there was a potential buyer. You grab the dog. I'll vacuum and we'll hope they don't open the dishwasher. We haunted the library, the park, sometimes the local restaurant. "We can't go home. Some stranger is walking around it." It was as though home was long gone but we still had to live there.

If it was challenging for me, it was a thousand-fold worse for the children. High school and middle school age, they were moving away from the only home they remembered. After years of navigating the nasty social waves of the pre-teen hood, both were finally feeling a sense of mastery in this very familiar environment. What kind of parents were we? This wasn't a military move, not a move brought on by job loss. The children understood those moves. We were moving because it "made sense" and would be a "better quality of life". If my daughter typed those lines, the quotes would be blood-dripping daggers. This was so not on their agenda. My daughter wanted to go to prom with her friends from kindergarten. My son was enjoying the freedom of biking around our small town without needing a chaperone. They could see the immediate future and their quality of life looked pretty darn good.

So if you heard what sounded like a sonic boom sometime around September 5^th 2008, that was us telling them we were moving. It would be months before my daughter referred to Chapel Hill as anything other than "the place where dreams go to die". My son, at first enthused at thought of a new place to explore, grew gradually less happy with the concept as time went on. My husband, trying to acclimate to a new job long distance, had the unenviable task of holding me together as I rode each wave of emotion the children threw in our direction. I went out and bought a silver cuff bracelet on which is inscribed, "This too will pass". I wore it like a talisman, a charm as a promise to myself that it would not always be like this.

And, like all bits of superstition, it had some truth. It wasn't always like that. The children helped us pick out the house we eventually bought in Chapel Hill. They claimed their rooms like gold diggers on a new strike. Our former home sold relatively quickly. The school system in our former hometown released the children from school a month early, sparing us the additional trauma of living in temporary housing or commuting from another town for that last month of school. The early release meant that my daughter didn't have to take final exams, letting her fully enjoy her last few days with her friends. My son's neighborhood friends threw him a party, promising to visit him as soon as they could.

This year, as the marathon thunders past the graveyard of St. Cecelia's, we'll be here in the southlands, trying to figure out what exactly one does with all those prickly little misnamed "sweet gum balls" that the tree in the backyard keeps spitting at us. There is no April vacation in Chapel Hill. Spring break was a week ago. The children and I went back north for the week. It was wonderful and difficult. We were very glad to come home and find that the sky was already turning that indescribable color known locally as Carolina Blue.