The Pods Have Landed
(Editor’s note: this post was written five months ago. Its publication was delayed by a lack of high-speed Internet access among other things, since resolved.)
The Pods have landed. Not without difficulties, I might add. Hoarder tendencies, a last minute push that left a large amount of stuff in our friends’ garage, and the necessity of adding a 10-foot U-Haul to the caravan leaving Summit highlighted the fact that we have not been treading lightly on the land.
And then to add insult to injury, the Pod doors refused to open once arrived. Plan B? More like Plan 9 from Outer Space. But with the help of some outstanding local movers (and a slight relaxation of the child labor laws) we were able to pry the doors open and begin unloading. Six hours later the house was overrun with boxes, furniture, and other stuff – and the contents of the much larger 8 Devon Road had effectively taken up new residence on the outskirts of Chapel Hill.
Now what? Well there’s the unpacking, of course. And the discovery of the local recycling center. “We don’t take cars from New Jersey,” said the attendant (yes, there are attendants) as I rolled in for the first time. Turned out he was from Mountain Lakes. There’s the four hours spent at the DMV getting a North Carolina driver’s license, and another hour or so registering the cars, at which point we discovered North Carolina’s personal property tax. (It’s always something.)
And, of course, the house itself is still not entirely finished. There are the usual issues with plumbing, electricity and paint. There’s a lot of red clay immediately surrounding us, waiting for growing season to come around. Still, things are looking up. Early on in the life of this blog, there were comments from some quarters (our kids) that we were perhaps becoming a little too elegiac, as if we were marching off to the knackers. Reviewing the posts, you can see their point. But we’re moving on from all that.
In fact, the house turned out nicely, if we do say so ourselves, and the view across the field is as pretty as we’d hoped. Sitting here this moment, a thunderstorm has just rolled through and the wild life are in full chatter. There are, we’ve been told by neighbors, coyotes, owls, and foxes so we’re keeping an eye out and the cat inside. There was a full moon the other night, rising over the pines.
At our age, we’re grounded by patterns established over many years. Moving away from the old ones can set you adrift until you establish something new. What we miss is our kids (we became empty nesters shortly after arrival here), our friends, and the habits of our earlier life. Before we moved, Nora gave me a book on “changing life circumstances”. Normally, I would take Groucho Marx’s advice with a tome of this sort (“This isn’t a book to put aside lightly; it should be thrown away with great force.”) but under the circumstances, I gave it a read. The word the author returned to continually for someone in our position was “disorienting.” It’s a good description.
Oddly enough, I may be more adrift than Nora sometimes; unlike me, she doesn’t live with the memory of a time and place that no longer exists. One thing I can say without reservation: our friends here have been wonderful. Their welcome to us has been more than we could have imagined. Without them, we really would be lost.
Sure, we look back sometimes, boats against the current and all that, but mostly we’re pushing ahead. We don’t always know where we’re going, but with any luck we’ll know it when we get there.
500 miles 