Borrowed time

There are many sagas to this move, but some only happen in our minds. Maybe most of the sagas only happen in our minds. In any case, the saga of our stuff is a mind-only saga. I’ll explain.

When we were first contracting with the movers, they gave us an estimated arrival date of mid- to late-January, with their best guess being that we’d see our stuff the week of January 29. That felt like a looooong way off from December 4 when we last saw it, but it was reasonable. After all, we were moving a rather large distance.

When we arrived here, we called to check to see whether they had an updated arrival date. They did. February 28. Note that that is an entire month later. I was way down in the dumps about it. We called earlier this week for an update (especially after the tanker sank off of the coast of England). The website said that our stuff was in Spain, transferring to a ship to China. The fellow we spoke to said that the scheduled arrival date was something like March 15. Of course, they weren’t actually sure where it was or which ship it happened to be on. This seemed like a bad sign. Would he investigate? Yes, he would, but it took him several days, each day making us feel more and more like we should be looking for our purple couch in photos from the shores of Devon.

Thursday morning we got the email: sorry, we were wrong. Your things aren’t in Spain and they haven’t not run aground in Devon. They’re actually in Sydney Australia and will be here, er, January 29 as originally scheduled.

This is, of course, a miracle. The ship still needs to come in, get unloaded, and have the containers clear customs before they can schedule it for delivery to us. So it might be a week or two away. Still, the idea that soon everything we own will be in New Zealand—that’s astonishing!

The difference between thinking we are months away from having our things to thinking we are days away is as wide as the Pacific. For the first two days, I was floating. I moved the furniture in and around in my mind, felt the flurry of excitement and also concern about all that needed to happen in the next two weeks rather than the next two months. There are walls to paint, furniture arrangements to figure out, things we didn’t manage to give away before we left to deal with, and all the borrowed things to give back.

Today, though, the things coming has awakened a fierce bout of homesickness. The purple couch won’t sit in the lovely livingroom on Belmont Road. The purple chaise, which I’ve imagined still tucked into the corner of my second-floor study, will be hard to place in this much-smaller house. I worry that a bunch of misplaced American furniture is coming to join a misplaced American family here in Paekakariki. Will any of us fit in?

Every night I dream of house renovations. Last night we were peeling off fiberglass nailed onto a sun room, and discovering a huge highway just outside the yard. We sat on the grass with the traffic whizzing by, dismayed—no renovation was going to move this 10 lane highway from our backyard. A US renovation dream. Some nights our renovations are in beach houses. Sometimes we install granite like the lovely counters in Belmont Road. Two days ago, we pressed shells into concrete countertops. When I woke to find the formica in the kitchen, I felt a wave of sadness. My days and nights are both in a state of revision.

We just finished dinner—the four of us, Perry lolling about, and Naomi’s friend, all eating a fish I've never heard of in the warm summer sunshine. The sound of the water garden from the next door neighbor competed in lovely ways with the gentle rhythm of the ocean. Our across the street neighbor, togs (= bathingsuit) in hand, called over the fence to tell us he was going to smoke the fish he caught last night and bring some over after his swim. Marianne came and picked up some fresh banana bread, and we made plans for dinner Monday night. This morning we picked up a William Christenberry print we got years ago from the Morris museum in Augusta, which we brought with us and had framed here. From the other room, the Indigo Girls are singing Winthrop, a song set just accross from Logan Airport in Boston: “Hear the dim roar of the last flight out, and for someone there is someone never coming back.” Old friends and new, old life and new, all coming together here bit by bit. This borrowed furniture has done most of its time now. Soon this house will be all us, and there’s something wonderful and also lonely about that. Our borrowing time is over, and so is the image that there is still a place to return to in Washington DC. For now, the children and the dog and the purple couch will all find their homes here.