Shedding the emotional connections

Moving house. It has to be done.

There’s an urban myth that moving house is as stressful as divorce, or the death of a loved one. Logically I know this can’t be true, though sometimes it feels like it. Not to over-dramatize—I’m not a migrant or a refugee, after all—moving house from a long-term and well-loved home can be hard going.

A little perspective helps. According to this Guardian article , in 1967 a couple of psychiatrists named Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe came up with the ‘Social Readjustment Scale’. It uses a checklist called ‘The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale’ which you can complete (if you really want to focus on stress). The bottom line is that the Number One stressful life event is (unsurprisingly) death of a spouse, with divorce a close second. Moving house doesn’t, in fact, feature on the list at all. So suck that up.

Yet it is what it is. On the websites of moving companies it’s common to find tips on how to navigate the stress of moving: take it slowly, they advise. Get to know your new neighbourhood, look to the future, make a memory book of the past. These websites speak of ‘fear of the unknown’ and ‘grief at leaving things behind’. Moving house may not rate with death and divorce, but major change can be the teensiest bit traumatic.

Already fading into the shadows of memory …

One last party

I decided to throw one last party at my old place. The final weeks in the house coincided with Christmas, so I invited my family and a few friends to see the old girl out. All my siblings came, travelling from other cities and interstate. I think the last time we were all at the same Christmas lunch table it was the 1980s.

Everyone brought a memory of the house to share. Most of these focussed on the parties: celebrating our parents’ 60^th wedding anniversary when we read the card from the Queen. Dad’s 90th birthday. The year I turned 64 and a Beatles tribute band played on the back verandah—‘When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now …’ The martini bar in the lounge room, the opera singers. Watch this video—the house knew how to host a party. It all culminated in a gorgeous spring wedding in the backyard just last September, when I felt we reached ‘peak house’.

Nostalgia for the parties. Martini bar, jazz, opera, The Beatles.

There were other more poignant memories. My son-in-law coming home to the house from two months in hospital fighting acute leukemia, his big dopey lovely dog Georgia bounding down the hallway to meet him. That Christmas in the early 2000s when my uni-aged daughter didn’t have any presents under the tree but instead was surprised with a new car parked outside. All the times the kids moved out and then moved back in and then moved out again. The time I myself moved out, packing everything up for storage and going to live in Europe for three years. But coming back.

The New Year’s Day when I and my then-little grandchild painted a rainbow serpent down the side fence (it’s still there, overgrown). I also wrote one of my favourite poems, Cavafy’s Ithaka, in black texta on that fence. Will the new owners find it, and wonder? 

The Rainbow Serpent. Will they wonder?

Remembering how it was

For the last Christmas party I made a slide show from old photographs and played it on the TV. Christmases past, two babies’ Naming Days, significant birthdays, renovations. That crimson bougainvillea which almost engulfed the house. We watched and laughed at my interior decorating bloopers over the years as the bedroom cycled through its Baby Blue Period, its Grey & Red Period with red chandeliers and Gothic castle vibe, then the hippy-ish Sunny Yellow Period, and on to the tasteful Native Foliage era.

Ghosts of bedrooms past.

We exclaimed at the old wood kitchen, and the moment when the bathrooms changed. The exterior, originally painted pink (!!) transmogrified into Federation cream trimmed with crimson & green, then into full beige mode, before settling to its current muted grey (with orange front door). The backyard pear trees planted as small saplings, which then grew taller than the house. The wisteria wrassled onto a frame, rewarding us seasons later with spectacular blooms—right in time for the wedding.

Wisteria: difficult to wrassle, but worth the effort.

And of course we remembered the Covid years, when our houses became our refuges in heightened ways. One of my Covid projects was to set up a Street Library. When the ‘Sold’ sign went up outside my house, the Street Library received a thank-you note from an anonymous neighbour. Aww … the new owners say they’ll keep it going.

Hatter’s Cottage Street Library, est. 2021

Everything into cardboard

Moving day approached and the stress began to tell. All the myriad decisions started to overload my brain and I found myself unable, sometimes, to figure out what to do next. The packers arrived for the first of two days of packing, and the rooms filled with the smell of cardboard in the morning. Bugs, dead and alive, emerged everywhere as if being evicted from a bug tenement. I gave away my old bed and slept on a mattress on the floor, ramping up the tenement vibe. The experience may not rank on the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale but it wasn’t fun.

Canyons of cardboard.

There was only one last thing to do. Wander through the canyons of cardboard boxes and say goodbye to the rooms emptied of me and my stuff, both physical and emotional. As I contemplated setting out on a journey into the new, some phrases from that beautiful Cavafy poem seemed hauntingly relevant …

As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery …

May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time …

But don’t hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich …

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Ithaka, C.P. Cavafy (1911), Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Read the whole poem at Poetry Foundation.

Cavafy on the fence.

On the day the sale of my house settled, I went back to my old suburb to drop off the keys with the real estate agent. ‘Want to buy an apartment in Gordon?’ he asked.

No thank you. I have other plans.