The Movefeatured

In the very early hours of the first day of October Jeremy and the dogs were woken up by sirens and flashing lights.  I was away at a corporate retreat so he ordered everyone to stay put and shut them in the bedroom while he hurried down the street to see what the commotion was.  Aurora ignored this, scurried up to her little attic hideout and poked her head out of a little hatch that she had installed in the roof for spying purposes.  Using her little brass naval telescope the resourceful spaniel reported to everyone down below that the house on the corner was on fire.

It was a terrible loss.  The house had been owned by a neighbor who recently died and it had been packed to the ceiling–while she had residence nearby she had grown up in this house and her parents had purchased it when our street was featured as our city’s first Parade of Homes in 1955.  The builder who had done our home had also done this corner house and Jeremy was dying to see if the fixtures and appliances were still all original–our house still had its copper Chambers stove.  He even tried to gently convince the owner to sell it to us just so we could restore the house to its former glory but to no avail.  She simply could not let go over her childhood home and all of its memories.  Her name was Pat and she was an odd duck; every holiday season she would drive up on the curb of houses decorated for Christmas and take pictures with an old 35mm film camera.  The dachshunds raised the alarm when they saw her aiming her camera at our house.  The sight of this elderly woman with no family alone in the cold taking pictures of houses lit up with Yuletide cheer struck us all as being very sad.  “We must be kind to her,” said Jeremy (which he had to remind himself when someone hit a possum in front of our house in the heat of summer and Pat kept bombarding his phone with reminders that he might want to do something about it).  Pat eventually passed away from complications of long haul Covid convinced to the end that the virus was a hoax.

Upon her death everyone in the neighbourhood wanted to know what would happen to the house, which had been left to her church.  It could have been the finest house on the block but decades of overgrowth and neglect had taken its toll; within a couple of days after Pat had died sketchy characters in run down vehicles had been seen at the property stripping it of everything of value they could find.  The house caught fire a few days later after some transients tried to cook meth and with the house crammed full of stuff it went up like a tinderbox.  The fire marshal wrote it off as a total loss.

The waste stuck in Jeremy’s craw especially.  I knew that his opinion of our neighbourhood had gone downhill from when he first moved in.  Break ins of houses and cars became common, harassment by transients happened with more and more frequency, a homeless camp set up under the bridge close to our house and threw rocks at passing cars.   One night Jeremy and I were concluding our evening walk when we saw a man testing the front door of our house to see if it was unlocked and peering in the front windows.  It felt like buzzards were circling around our property ready to swoop down and steal everything.  It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that he was fed up and making noises about moving but I didn’t think anything would happen for a few more years yet.  However there was one variable I foolishly hadn’t considered and that was our Supernatural Spoiled Spaniel.

Even though Aurora herself had suggested the attic room for her to live in I would occasionally hear her grumbling about it.  I had to at least give her this–she was right, we’d run out of space.  But it was what it was and it couldn’t be helped.  The Airbnb house had been a massive success and was kept hopping with paying guests so she was unable to take it over for any real amount of time.

“You’ve both had massive upgrades to your jobs,” she informed me while sitting at the dining table with an accountant’s calculator wearing a green visor and swiftly scribbling figures with a pencil clenched firmly in one paw.  “I’m so glad you decided to leave the public school and go someplace you are actually appreciated and treated with respect.  With your pay bump from the clinic we are now solidly comfortable.”

“Despite your best efforts,” I rejoined tartly and she sneered at me.  “It’s all a matter of priorities,” she informed me.  “Things are nice.  But I think we went a bit overboard on the things and now the “space” side of the equation is unbalanced…there is a fix for this.”

I knew what she meant and I felt sick.  “I don’t want to move,” I told her in no uncertain terms.  Even with the neighbourhood not being the safest there is our little house was cozy and I knew that Jeremy would shut down any unauthorized upgrades from her.

Normally this would indeed be so but he had been having regular nightmares about the house being broken into, the dogs missing, or Unsolved Mysteries coming to film at our house after I disappear from the walking trail.  It all wore him down.  Aurora discovered this fear during one of her spying sessions eavesdropping on Jeremy talking to one of his friends.

“The iron is hot once again,” she must have thought, “And now, to strike–!”

At some point after this Gustav told me that he had gone into the den to find Jeremy sitting in his chair, eyes closed, Aurora sitting on the ottoman in front of him with a pocket watch on a chain clasped in one paw.  She was addressing him in a low, murmured tone.

“A corner lot,” she said.

“Corner lot,” Jeremy mumbled.

“Oh yes–and a pool!”

His head nodded but his eyes were still closed.  “Pool.”

“Now–when you wake up–you will have no memory of this conversation.  But you know what to do, yes?  Understand?  Excellent.  Call Jerrid tonight.  Now!” and with one hard snap of her claws Jeremy’s eyes flew open and eventually focused on the fat little spaniel who was cheerfully handing him an old fashioned.  “Now that’s more like it,” he said appreciatively.  “I’m glad you’ve acknowledged the way of things around here.”

It was the devious look in her eyes as she gave him a smile in response that sent Gustav running to me to report what had happened.  “I don’t know why you call US treacherous when what SHE does is FAR more troublesome than we could ever be,” he grumbled.  “You might as well make all the stories about her, we can’t compete.”  Johann Sebastian agreed.  “She is up to something,” he warned.  I twisted my lips and eventually confronted her but it was fruitless (“Away, moron!”).

Less than a week after Pat’s house caught fire Jeremy offered to go for a drive.  “Where to?” I asked.  “Wherever we feel like,” he answered breezily.  I thought it was odd that he had directions entered in on his phone, but he dodged the question when I asked him where we were going.  I had figured that he’d bought something on Marketplace to surprise me and we were going to pick it up, and I did indeed get the surprise of my life when he rolled up to the curb in front of a house with a realtor’s sign in the front yard and asked me if I thought it was our forever home!

I think he was expecting me to clap my hands and giggle with delight but it actually threw me into a tailspin of panic that locked me up frozen solid for the rest of the night.  I love our house.  We can’t afford to buy a house.  It’s fall and will soon be winter, the perfect season for our cozy den.  Why are we looking at houses?

I have been very proud of all the hard work I’ve done to manage my anxiety but there are some situations where I simply cannot hang onto the reins and dealing with real estate is one of them.  I realized I was a few steps behind on the most recent developments when I met Jerrid the realtor on Saturday morning and heard him tell Jeremy “I have the other four listings we talked about.”  I was initially very alarmed but Jerrid had a way about him where I felt instantly that he was a friend who could be trusted and everything would be all right.

Buying and selling a home is a time that tries the souls of everyone involved and this was no exception.  Aurora was strangely unbothered by the angst and tribulations of the adult human beings.  On the contrary she was downright cheerful, whistling the theme to The Muppet Show as she puttered about sealing boxes, dancing a soft-shoe when she thought no one was looking and she even left Bowie alone.

The rough timeline that Jeremy had given me was that it would be a 2-3 month search, or however long it took until we found something that we liked.  I heard a whisper in my ear that sounded suspiciously like Aurora say “You’ll be under contract by this time next week” and sure enough, Jerrid sent us the listing for the house on Monday morning.  When we toured it, it seemed almost too good to be true; like the house had just manifested itself from our wildest dreams.  Later that evening we flipped through the listing pictures again and again with the dachshunds exclaiming over every picture and Jeremy reciting every extra and feature.  “The master closet.  That bath.  The kitchen.  It’s on a beautiful corner lot, the nicest in the whole neighbourhood.  The pool–” and then his eyes slid suspiciously over to Aurora, who was sitting on the couch cushion like a little sultan and smiling so widely that her eyes were scrunched up into little half-moons.

“Aren’t you glad I rejoined the family?” she asked smugly.

It was all very exciting until Jerrid said that photographers would come to our current home next week to take pictures for the listing and then the other shoe dropped and panic really set in.  I have never been good at ending chapters or saying goodbyes and I don’t know how to explain it.  But the entire situation was in the hands of God, Jerrid, and the paws of Aurora–so success was guaranteed.

However on the big day my devotional warned “there is no miracle without chaos” and my unsettling feeling that we were doomed got to a point where it couldn’t be ignored.  The actual transportation of our stuff from point A to B could only be described as a nightmare and while everyone else laughed about it once it was over, for me it was a genuinely traumatic experience.  Were it not for the kindness of Jeremy’s parents, the movers who stayed hours after they were contracted, Jerrid/his firm who ran over to the house at 6 am to grab the stuff we’d forgotten about in the back yard, and the sheer rage/willpower of a Supernatural Spoiled Spaniel we would not have made it.  As it was I casually flirted with cardiac failure that entire weekend and it was days before I could keep down solid food again.  The stress and pure panic torpedoed my health for almost a month.

The dachshunds and Bowie lucked out of this particular chapter of disaster; they were boarded throughout the most harrowing parts of the move but were still panicked when they arrived at the new house.  Aurora was singing happily to herself in one of the upstairs bedrooms getting everything she wanted just so but the rest of us tiptoed around uneasily, rattling about in this gorgeous house that was so much larger than anything we were used to.  With everything we owned in boxes and unable to find anything we felt like we were just on vacation or house sitting for a friend–it didn’t feel like it was ours.  But as the weeks passed we unpacked boxes and moved furniture when we could, what was strange soon became normal and we all slowly adjusted to our new home (getting all the books unpacked helped a lot).

Our new neighbourhood was very fine indeed and the trees were still in their fall colours.  On my first walk I realized that I didn’t feel like I had to keep looking over my shoulder every ten seconds.  Children played in the streets, racing each other on bikes and scooters or clustered around the number of Little Free Libraries (One was quite close to the house; Johann Sebastian would be interested) and I saw a college aged young man visiting home for the weekend playing football with his little brother in their front yard.  It was like we’d stumbled into a Norman Rockwell painting and as the trauma from the move slowly faded we all gave thanks for our good fortune and everyone who had helped us along the way.

The first time we really got snowed in at the new house I was prepared.  The previous owners had kindly left a deep freezer in the garage and it had been my new calling in life to fill it with every type and cut of protein available.  The dachshunds couldn’t believe it when I carried in three entire beef tenderloins that had been on sale at Aldi for half off–I ended up cutting three pieces for wellingtons and about 18 filets.  There were three turkeys in there at one point, some racks of lamb, gallons and gallons of bone broth that had been frozen into 2 cup blocks and sealed (my food saver got quite the workout) chickens and there was even a duck.  But after thanksgiving when Aldi put hams on sale from $2.85 a pound to 95 cent per pound I started coming home with two or three hams every trip.  By the New Year there were nine hams crammed into the deep freezer.

So when we got iced in at the end of January I was more than ready and everyone kept busy cooking and baking meals, snacks and other treats.  With Jeremy’s school and my clinic closed, by lunchtime there was a ham roasting in the oven, Johann and Gustav was mixing a vanilla cake, and the entire house was filled with the scent of fresh bread from the Zojirushi machine.  Everyone was in a good mood because no one had to go anywhere.

Ever the philosopher, I saw Johann Sebastian watching the sleet come down outside as the cake was baking and he curled up by the fire.  “Weather like this isn’t so bad when you use it to count your blessings,” he said.  “It makes the fire in the fireplace toastier, the food tastier, and the blankets cozier,” he said.  We all agreed with him; every word was true.  Then the fat red haired dachshund held up one claw and quoted Buddha: “There is a treasury full of jade and jewels; it is within you.  Don’t go searching far from home for it–for it is there.”

And it was so.