Moving and Settling In
WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE ABOUT MOVING? Almost everything.
Packing and unpacking tops most people’s lists. Having divested 90 percent of our belongings on the move from Rhode Island to Brooklyn, packing was the easy part for us. We shipped what we had and put our hands in our pockets. At our new house, we camped out for three weeks until our goods arrived. What we had in abundance were paintings I’d inherited from my mother or acquired on my own, plus framed photographs taken by me or by young people I’d worked with around the world.
The big lift, we quickly realized, was re-furnishing, turning our six-room house into a living space. It would have been much easier if we had skipped the giving-everything-away phase on our way to Brooklyn.
Re-furnishing meant shopping, a lot of shopping, which is a challenge in a tourist-leaning small town like Ashland with boutiques selling lifestyles. The employee owned discount store Bi-Mart, a quarter of a mile’s drive from our house, became our go-to place. “Whether it’s the everyday shopping list, a home improvement project, automotive maintenance or outfitting for the great outdoors, you’ll find it and more at your local Bi-Mart,” their ad says.
Amazon filled a lot of gaps, I admit with some shame, from soap dishes to queen-sized bed frames. The good news is that all it took was a computer and a click. The bad news is that it may be easier to find a house you like sight unseen than a pendant light.My order history at amazon.com shows 53 orders for April and May and 10 returns.
Meanwhile, a desk I purchased from Ikea took six weeks to arrive. Apparently, Ashland isn’t within market range of their Portland store, so the desk traveled from a warehouse in the South to Chicago, where another hauler carried it west. It took four months for the couches I’d ordered last winter at West Elm to reach us.
The hardest part of moving for Tony and me, however, was prioritizing. Before we arrived, we had a short list of things to tackle immediately: installing hard wood floors and new carpeting, replacing kitchen appliances, redoing the bathrooms with their 1980’s vanities. We did the first, but postponed the others. Instead, we widened the pass-through window between the kitchen and the dining room to reveal the glorious backyard meadow that makes this house so special.
Saving the 20 plus goldfish in the manmade pond in front of the house became an urgent project. The circulation system that drew water from the pond, up a small hill, and down a waterfall back into the pond, providing oxygen for the fish, was failing. The “experts” Tony called either didn’t show up or wanted too much money, so Tony, ever a handyman, dove in. He checked for leaks, adjusted the water flow, and using quilt batting as a filter, he rid the pond water of the dirt that had accumulated, changing the batting daily until the water was crystal clear. Counting gold fish in a pond is a rough science, but we think there are now 30.
Tony’s top priority, though, was turning our two-car garage into a workshop. Tony started his adult working life as an Italian professor and then a manufacturing executive, but inspired by our son Carl, he threw himself into helping build solar lights in small villages in East Africa and elsewhere. More recently he turned, in his words, to “designing and building wooden joysticks for virtual reality hobbyists.” In Brooklyn, he split his workshop between our three-room apartment and a ten-square-foot stall he rented for $450 a month, riding his bike 45 minutes to get there. Here in Ashland, the garage was all his and he worked day and night to make it right.
For my part, weeding became my obsession. I have gardened all my life and one of our house’s lures was the flower beds and stone walks that surrounded it, laid out with care by the woman who had lived here for 20 years. As spring arrived, so did the weeds, including fierce ones like lilies of the valley which have one of the sweetest smells on earth but left unchecked, invade everything.
And the deal with weeds, as gardeners know, is that they do not wait. With every passing day, they become harder to uproot. And if you don’t dig out the roots, they raise their heads again. For a month, I spent the better part of most days as a weed warrior. My arms and legs ached.
Still, even in those over stretched days, we loved our new house more than any house we had lived in before. So much sun streamed through the skylight in our kitchen that we kept wondering if we had left the lights on.
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