Jennifer Groft

We closed on the house Friday morning and moved right in. Sort of. Our furniture is still not here yet, and I had grand plans to get in and really clean the house.

What actually happened was a couple trips to pick up all our stuff at the AirBnB, a trip to Walmart for some air mattresses (sheets and blankets borrowed from James and Artemis), and a scattered attempt at cleaning that didn’t really get us anywhere. The enormity of the work to be done here clouded the boundaries on what needed to be cleaned and what needed to be fixed. But the bathrooms are clean now, (Thank you, Lily), and almost all of the floors were either swept or vacuumed.

I washed a few windows, measured some more stuff, and ran up and down the stairs getting us all as settled as possible. My watch said 50 flights, but it was way more than that.

Mostly I just wandered around in awe. This is my house! This is really my house.

There were times in the past year, as we worked so hard to make the plan to move here work out, when it seemed like a far off fairy tale. And truly, there were times we almost despaired that we could do it. But there I was, standing there in my own home in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

Tomorrow, in theory at least, most of our stuff will arrive. Then the house will start to really transform and there will be so much more work to do unpacking and putting things in places.

But for today, we are still camping. Air mattresses, freezing our asses off at night in our summer jammies and sheets, preparing meals with no pots and pans. It really is a special kind of time, one that we’ve experienced just a few other times in the course of moving.

Life holds all kinds of lines that separate memories into before and after an event. In these few days, I almost feel like we are outside of time. We are living ON the line of demarkation. Tomorrow a whole different thing begins and these days will fade into a little flash of memory – when the house still smelled like other people and running up and down the stairs was the best entertainment.