Hit the Road Jack (Part 1)

As I am sure few of you have noticed, I have not posted anything in the last three or four months. Like the Blues Brothers, I have been on a mission from God, though it has not involved crashing any cars, or producing second rate versions of old R&B tunes. Instead, I have been engaged in moving. Anyone who has undertaken this process knows what a traumatic bear it can be (if there is such a thing as a traumatic bear).*

We lived in our house in Abington for 26 years. That is longer, by far, then any other place I have lived. Initially, I thought that this couldn’t be true, since the house I grew up in is so etched in my memory, but it is, and it’s not even close. We moved into my childhood home when I was three, and my parents moved out 20 years later. Do the math (I did, though I admit it took me awhile).

We bought this house when our second child was on the way. We owned a row home in the Art Museum area of Philadelphia, but it was not suited to four of us, especially with two kids under three years old. (The child’s bedroom without a lock at the top of the stairs was a dead giveaway.)

We sold our row home while the blizzard of 1996, the single biggest snowstorm on record in Philadelphia with a total of30.7 inches of snow, raged. We thought maybe we would stay in the city, but we could not find anything we liked, so we started the suburban search. Even though I had lived in Philly for over 10 years by that point, I didn’t know the suburbs well, so it was something of a crap shoot.

We looked at a house in Ambler that seemed perfect. The previous owners had added on a master (now “primary” in the PC of house hunting) bedroom, so it had plenty of room. It also had a pool, which was enticing. We were looking at it with my in-laws when my father-in-law took me aside and said, “Come with me”. Bill was a very nice, soft-spoken man, and an engineer to boot. He walked me down to the end of the driveway, where we turned around to look at the house. He didn’t have to say anything. Even to me the sag in the roof between the old portion of the house and the add-on was clear. We gathered up Julie and her mom and left.   

The owners of the house we bought had already vacated when we did our walk through. That made it difficult for the imagination impaired, like me. How would furniture fit into this place? Was the basement a total loss, or could it be converted to a room for the kids? Did the kitchen have enough countertop space, and was the pass through a good, or bad, idea? Luckily, I had a wife with better vision, who saw the potential where I saw only questions.

In 26 years, you learn the plusses and minuses of a home. Having a 95-year-old house is pretty cool, but it means plaster walls, porous windows, asbestos on cellar pipes, and weird, unusable nooks and crannies. It also means huge old tees that look great but are rotting on the inside and can come crashing down on your home (or a neighbors) if you’re not careful.

The bottom line, however, is that it is your home. You know the spots that get the morning sun and are therefore the best for reading. You have redone the kitchen so it’s a place where people want to hang. Yes, certain things are awkward (what’s that pipe doing jutting out from the wall), but you have developed your work arounds. Entering the house truly feels like entering your home.     

More importantly, there are so many memories, both good and bad, tied up within those four walls. You watched your kids grow in that space, filling it up and making it their own. You felt yourself age, taking the stairs you bounded up when you first moved in much slower as the years went by. The ghosts of game nights, Halloween parties and Thanksgiving dinners lingered. The past co-existed with the present in a very visceral way.

But none of those are reasons to linger past the expiration date. There were way too many rooms. The stairs were creaky, and so are our knees. If we were going to stay, money needed to be invested, and it was unlikely we would ever see that back. The market was hot, and all signs suggested this was a propitious time to go. So, we dove in.

Frankly, if I knew the angst that decision would cause, I am not sure that I wouldn’t have stayed perched on the end of the diving board (just like in junior high – a memory I wish I could forget). It would have been the wrong decision, but I would have been saved the never-ending list of things that had to be done, the 2:00 a.m. reruns of Perry Mason (which was a much better show before I knew anything about the law), the endless worries about financing, and the time deadlines that seemed both far off, and immanent at the same time.   

Hopefully, you will indulge me while I revisit those months in the next few entries. I just need to get it out of my system. Luckily, I think it all comes to a happy ending.

*Since my last posting I realized that many of the images I was uploading may be copywrited. As such, I have now gone to artists renderings, for better or worse.