Spiritual Growth Through … Moving?

By Elizabeth Sherrill, Higham, Massachusetts

As appeared in

I stood looking out the kitchen window wondering how John and I could ever leave this house.

We’d lived here for 50 years. There under the maple tree was the garden patch where we grew tomatoes that never ripened. There was the stump of the cedar we cut down to make room for our daughter’s wedding reception.

The real-estate agent was coming in a few minutes to help us “neutralize the place,” as she put it. “No personal things showing,” she’d instructed.

But everything in the house was personal! The mantelpiece where our three children hung their Christmas stockings. The shelves John built into a downstairs closet to furnish a bedroom for my mother.

With every room I entered came some stab of impending loss. The night before, as I lay in bed, it had been the sound of rain on the roof. In an apartment we won’t have a roof, just another apartment above us.

Moving meant everything would change. And the most painful change of all, living many miles from long-time friends and familiar surroundings.

There was no doubt in my mind, with both of us in our eighties, that we were making the right decision to move from New York to Massachusetts, where we’d be near family. Why was it so much easier to make up your mind than to make up your emotions?

The doorbell rang. The real-estate agent was very young, very blonde and wore very high heels. She’d brought a pink brochure titled “Preparing Your House for Sale” and a stack of cardboard sheets that could be folded into boxes. With a small camera she made a rapid and, it seemed to me, faintly disapproving inventory of each room.

For the next several days, brochure in hand, John and I stripped surfaces of ornaments and family photos, cleared the clutter of appliances from the kitchen counter, emptied closets, filled the boxes and hauled everything down to the basement.

Change, it was clear, didn’t wait for the actual move itself. Already it was like living in a strange place. We couldn’t find anything, not even the extra blankets we needed when the temperature dropped. They had to be in a box somewhere…

We repainted the front porch (page three of the brochure: “Make your entryway inviting”). I went to the garden shop and bought a basket of petunias to hang outside the front door, but John had ripped out the old nail when painting. Nails and hammer were in his tool room in the basement, now crammed floor to ceiling with those cardboard boxes. After rummaging among them for an hour, John drove to the hardware store.

“We can’t sell you one nail,” the clerk told him. “They come in one-pound boxes.” The store owner overheard. Because John has bought things there for years (another stab—leaving old relationships!), the owner discovered an item that “just popped out of the box,” and John came triumphantly home with a single nail. (He used his shoe for a hammer.)

Among the things we couldn’t find, the hardest to cope with were missing papers. “If you could clear off your desks a little…” the agent had advised after a shuddering glance at rooms cluttered with magazines, notebooks, files, folders, correspondence. “You could also straighten the bookcases,” she added.

I followed her reproachful gaze to shelves where books were wedged behind books, balanced on top of books or cluttered on the floor.