going

We've got twenty-four hours to go until moving day. Or one more sleep, as the girls would say. Yesterday we teetered on the edge of chaos. I had read Psalm 86 in the Liturgy of the Hours in the morning; "make my heart simple and guileless" and that was my mantra when the stress started to turn ugly. I think it worked, I hope it worked. It has been easy for me to forget how big this all is for the kids. Isobella is in turns wildly excited and desperately heart-broken. She is sad about leaving our neighbours, and was nearly hysterical when I packed up the last of their toys.

I'm glad I said my good-byes to this house a couple of months ago, because that house is gone. In its place is a shell filled with boxes. They are piled up in the hall and piled up in the lounge. They sit waiting to be shifted, with their exact destination scrawled across the top of them. Kitchen, under-sink cupboard; Kitchen, cupboard under far window; Kitchen, shelves below servery.

But every where I look I see corners still filled with us, piles of us, monuments to the family that once made home here. Today is the day I take them down. The calendar hanging above the bench.  The little "to be sorted" pile by the knife block. The stones we collected from Great Barrier Island on the kitchen window sill, beside my postcard of Rembrandt's "Prodigal Son" where I sometimes stand and pray. How do I pack those? And what label would go on the outside of the box?

This is my last post from comfortable suburbia. We are leaving the house we've been living in since Isobella was nine months old. We arrived here with a cat and a baby, and are leaving with two more children and a dog.  When I next write (and who knows when that will be, as we are moving beyond the reaches of broadband!) I won't look over the roofs of houses, or down onto little contained sections filled with other people's lives. My view will be trees and sky and water. What will I do in all of that space?

There is an inevitability about this move that takes my breath away. As if this moment was waiting for us, somewhere in our future. As if it was a point we could have come to from any angle, and on any time frame. You could say it's like turning a chapter in the book of our lives, but that, apart from being a cliche, feels too passive. It's not like that at all. This move feels like pushing open an enormous and heavy door with all of our weight, and then slamming it shut behind us. There's no going back.