Moving

We are getting ready to move.  Or maybe I should say, I am procrastinating getting ready to move.  We are moving in about three weeks.  The house we are moving to is only a few miles away.  It is a much nicer home in a much nicer neighborhood.  It isn't the moving to the new house that has me procrastinating.  When I think of unpacking and settling in, I get excited about it.  But when I think of packing up our things in this house and getting ready to move, it feels overwhelming. 



I have lived in this house 6 years.  It isn't my first house, it isn't the nicest house I've ever owned, but it is the first house I picked out and purchased all on my own.  The house wasn't much in the way of style when Michaela and I moved into it.  The yard was bare grass with the very minimum of builder installed landscaping.  The walls were white. 



you really must click this to enlarge to
see the signifcance of the flowers and
the entire day all in one shot

 18 months later I got married in the back yard.  The yard was still mostly grass and Michaela and I cut baby beauganvilla branches and taped them to the fence in strategic places to make it look a little nicer for pictures.  The next five years were a constant of change as we converted this house into a home, a small oasis to come home to at the end of a long day.  A place filled with love.

There are a million memories in this house.  Most good, some bad, some bad things that happened that at least turned into a great story (one of my favorite quotes:  If you are going to laugh about it some day, you might just as well go ahead and laugh now).  The disaster of building the back patio.  The 5 times Bill had to dig the 'pond' because of the torential rains that kept caving it in.  Painting walls and repainting walls and repainting walls.  Carpets ruined by kids and pets.  Floors tiled by a friend who just moved in until the job was done...him in one spare room, my mom in the other, the house in disarray (talk about a full house!)  Hundreds of empty bottles of wine that decorate our 'plant shelves'...each with its own story.   House plants that we stuck in the ground outside to see what would happen, that are 25 feet tall now (gotta love Florida!).  Kids shoveling and carrying decorative rock from the front to the back for days on end.  Tears, fights, doors slammed, kids sneaking in, kids sneaking out, dreams shared, plans made, hands held, cars wrecked, children becoming adults...all in this house. 

I have moved maybe 25 times in my life.  Military life does that to you.  I take a lot of pictures, those can go with me, the walls cannot.  But never before have I left anything irreplaceable behind.  Because in our new home, there will be new memories, there will be good times, there will be sad times.  There will be planning and replanning, changing of landscapes and paint and furniture.  There will be parties and friends and children and grandchildren.  It will be a wonderful place for us to build the rest of our lives. 

But Michaela will never make a memory there. She has made her last earthly memories for me.  The memory of her sitting at the counter asking me questions about college applications.  The memory of me hearing her crying and coming out of the bedroom to see her laying with her head on Bill's lap crying her eyes out over relationship problems.  The memory of her growing from a girl who wouldn't show her breasts to a male doctor for a school exam to a girl who would lay out naked in the back yard on top of the hot tub.  Taffy pulling party, craft days, crying over homework at the dining room table, sitting around the fire pit in the back yard, wrestling with her brother on the living room  floor, playing Wii boxing with Erin, her friends tossed all over the living room or sitting at the dinner table, Christmas', birthdays, late nights up talking in the living room, sitting on her bed with her when she was upset, her excitement over her adult bedroom set that was to be her legacy furniture, carving pumpkins, coloring easter eggs with me-just the two of us-because everyone else thought it was stupid, cookie nights, food fights, catching frogs and lizards and moths....just so many...so very many.   That I can look at any spot in this house and see her in it.  See her doing something perfect normal, something perfectly every day, something that she will never do again. 

Still, I know we will be happy there.  I know we are doing the right thing by moving.  She has made her feelings very clear on the subject.   She will be in that house with us--forever.  In that I am blessed.  Michaela doesn't need a physical presence on this earth to be with us.  She is willful and she is a manipulator.  She always has been.  She has been able to make signs strong enough to make all but the most cynical non-believer at least raise an eyebrow and I am even more blessed that I can talk about these things with my friends.  They are real, they happen, and my friends believe in every part of it...in fact many of them experience her too and aren't very shy about telling me about it.  I love when I hear that someone 'saw' her or 'heard' her or 'felt' her and that they understood why she was there.  Sometimes it is even people she didn't know on this earth.  It makes me so very happy to think about it all as a whole (there is more that she has influenced lately besides the house for us, but must save that surprise for later). 

But the big ones, the overwhelming feelings of her presence, stumbling across something she wrote that I haven't seen before, finding her Facebook words restored, the undeniable signs that she is right here-just around the corner-just out of sight, those come with a price.  They are precious and they are priceless, but afterwards is the eternal let down...that no matter how hard she tries, she can't come back.

I know you are happy where you are Michaela.  I know you now understand things that I do not.  I love you Michaela.