All the house is a stage

It’s kind of like living in cartoon time. You know, where the sun comes up red in the morning, arcs across a bright blue sky, then disappears 30 seconds later behind the hills. Over and over.  Everything is heightened, compressed.

A chance phone call set it all in motion.  We had planned to put our house on the market in the spring of 2017, but there was never anything magical about that date.  It just seemed to work.  But like so many other things … the best laid plans, mice, men, etc. the world intruded.  The timetable moved up.

Leaving a house where you’ve lived for 27 years and raised five children is an emotional experience for sure, but it has a physical element as well. All that stuff doesn’t move itself, as Nora has said.  And then there’s the theatre of selling the house, the “staging” as they say in the real estate trade.

The point seems to be, in part, to pretend no one lives there. It’s like the story of Clementis’s hat in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.  In a photo, Clementis places his hat on the head of Soviet era comrade.  When Clementis is subsequently airbrushed from history, all that’s left of him is the hat.  Kundera wrote (apropos of politics, not moving) that, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”  Words for our age.

So we paint, we clean, we simplify, we bookend the work we did nearly thirty years ago when we began to fill our home with love and kids and stuff. We lift the boxes, shuffle the furniture, and flip the rugs.  But we’re not 25 anymore, and things seem heavier, freighted with memories.

We love our house.  The Christmases, the first steps, the spills, the joys, the late nights wearing out the floor waiting for children to get home. The kids, of course, have never lived anywhere else, so it’s harder on them.  In a few years they’ll be coming home to a new house in a new place that they don’t know. In this play, we’re all both actors and agents, with more drama to come.

Act III, Scene 3: Exit, pursued by a bear. (Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale)