10 things I've learned about life while moving into a new house
The fantasy of arrival dies quickly, but something better replaces it.
Ed. note: I’m switching this Friday newsletter to a classic Top 10-style feature, similar to several writers I admire (Austin Kleon, Wally Holland). On Tuesdays I send out a longer essay or reported feature that involves a bit more legwork; I’m taking a shot at a new paid subscription model to support those stories.
Thanks for reading.
We’re 10 days into living in our new home, so here are 10 things I’ve been thinking about this past week.
Moving is just awful.
And what I mean by that is, of course, the complex act of moving all yr stuff from one house to another is just pure chaos, even for the most diligently organized among us. It’s just pure disorientation. The kids and the dogs are excited about the new house, and we are too (it feels like a triumph to land this particular location, a mission accomplished), but the administrative workload of moving is kind of head-spinning, innit? I underestimated the brief but powerful mental health toll that this would take on me.
There’s an old familiar trap that maybe a lot of other people 30+ will understand: You can regularly kid yourself into believing that a plateau lies just ahead, a moment of rest and stasis, a brief window of arrival somewhere, finally. But as we all come to learn that plateau is a fantasy. There is no arrival. Or, rather, we mistake transitions for destinations. Everything just keeps rushing along, and it’s all you can do to take a beat and enjoy the ride, the sheer velocity, the simple experience of it all, because—and here’s another old familiar trap—it all goes by so fast. Before you know it, the new house is the old house, the baby is now the toddler is now the adolescent is now the teenager, the shining dream that lay before you (not a plateau, never a plateau) now lays, blurry, awash in sepia tone, somewhere vaguely in the rearview mirror. So, yeah, moving kinda feels like that. Love the new house, though. We’ve got a killer backyard.
I sometimes think journalism permanently rewired my brain. After you've spent years walking into city council meetings, diners, barber shops, high school football games and church basements asking strangers to explain where they live, it's hard to stop. Every place develops its own internal logic if you give it enough time. The question that rolls around in my brain is some variation on, How does this place work? Where do people celebrate? Where do they complain? Which restaurant has the best burger? Which road does everybody avoid? Every community has a grammar that only reveals itself if you spend enough time listening. That's probably why I like writing from coffee shops; they're front-row seats to a town introducing itself. Incidentally, that’s where I am now as I write this, a coffee shop down the street from our new place.
I've spent an embarrassing amount of time this week thinking about which way to turn: out of the driveway, leaving the grocery store, within the grocery store, getting to daycare. Everything that used to happen automatically now requires just a second of thought. It's amazing how much of a life gets compressed into habit; you don't realize how much of your life runs on muscle memory until it disappears. Even inside the house, I'm opening the wrong cabinet for a coffee mug or standing in the basement trying to remember where we put the batteries. We like to think the scaffolding of adulthood is in the big stuff—the mortgage!, the career!, raising kids!—but most days it's just thousands of tiny unconscious decisions you've rehearsed so many times that they disappear. Then you move, and suddenly they're all visible again.
We’d made lists of what we wanted in a new home: our must-haves, nice-to-haves, never-agains, maybes, etc. On my list of gee-wouldn’t-that-be-nice was pine trees. I wanted pines in our yard. We got ‘em. This was not on our dealbreaker list when looking for homes because great big trees are mostly out of our hands; they’re either there on the property or they’re not—and they won’t be for many years. Mature trees are gifts from strangers. In our backyard, we have a row of Eastern White Pines and a good Colorado Blue Spruce. Visually, they are wonderful. They are tall and mighty and evergreen. I can’t wait to see them in the winter.
Every old neighborhood has things nobody alive today actually built. Big oak trees, stone walls, sidewalks worn smooth. Somebody made decisions decades ago that now make an ordinary afternoon a little nicer for the rest of us.
That backyard will be very important. A good backyard, I think, can become the emotional center of family life.
There is joy in the unique vocabulary of a house and a family. In our old place, our daughter called her bedroom her “backroom,” because when she moved out of the nursery this new room was further back in the house. She was 2, and maybe “backroom” was easier to say. This stuck. I always liked that phrase; “Let’s go play in my backroom,” she’d say. I like all the unusual things our kids say. But the backroom is gone, to be replaced by… “the uproom”? Upstairs? That’s dad trying to force something, so probably not. The point is that some new language will emerge in this environment. A new house is anthropology, especially with kids in tow. Joy is, in part, the slow accumulation of specificity, of something specific that is shared but intimate. This is language, place, memory, activity—but something real and recognized.
Our dogs had the new house figured out before we did. They’re all joy, what with their specific way of settling into a home. Within the first day they'd identified the best window for neighborhood surveillance, the transit of afternoon sun across the living room, and the exact stretch of backyard fence where they can run alongside the neighbor’s dog, Gracie. Meanwhile, I’m still wandering around looking for scissors. Dogs are not tied up in the square footage of a house or the nuances of amortization tables. They don’t bother with paperwork. Dogs just start living, always, over and over. There's a lesson in that somewhere.
(Periodically, I see this book in bookstores. I’ve never read it, but I can imagine the gist. I live with two hounds who are getting up in there in years, and while they are a crazed and jumpy pair they are also wise.)
We lost power July 3, like thousands of other families in Northeast Ohio. We were out for eight hours, so it was no big deal, but it was long enough to stay awake at night and wonder how this place behaves when things stop working. That's something the inspection can't really tell you: what does this place feel like in the margins of life? When the power goes, when the wind blows high, when the temps drop below zero, etc. Over time you simply need to feel out the new house through experience: You learn where the water pools in the yard and which branches sway a little too close to the roof and whether the neighbors all emerge onto their porches at the same time to compare notes. You can’t really get a good sense for a house on sunny afternoons or during professional inspections; you must meet a place in bad weather to understand it. The first hard rain, the first winter freeze, the first power outage—those are the moments when you see how a house truly behaves (and how you do).
There will come a day—I don't know when—when I'll back out of the driveway without thinking about it. I'll know which coffee shop has the strongest WiFi. I'll stop referring to places as "the new..." anything. It'll happen without anyone saying as much; there will be no ceremony. One day this place will stop feeling like somewhere we're staying and start feeling like somewhere we've always been. That's how most of life works, as far as the transitions we all experience; we simply subsume the “new” into the “now.” Eventually, you just don’t remember what felt unfamiliar.
This is bittersweet, I should add, and there’s reason not to celebrate when you notice this… Much of life is the practice of ongoing loss, of saying good-bye to past uncertainties and joys and sadnesses and moments. This can be cathartic, but it can also be heartbreaking. There’s very little that we can do about this. Time marches on, and we’d better get good at practicing mindfulness, at appreciating the present, because it’s all slipping away. I try not to dwell on this, but a new house will do that to you. Already, the old house is “the old house,” a place we’ll visit only in occasional stories to our kids (and, for these next few weeks, as I go back to mow the lawn).
Of course, you’re not so much moving into a new house as moving into a new version of your life. And isn’t that always the case?
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Ed. note: Phish is back on tour, by the way. Here’s nearly an hour of psychedelic improvisation across three songs from their time in Madison, Wisc., to send you into the weekend…