Moving Across the Country

I realized this week that I didn’t write much about moving. I don’t really know why. When I write, I wait for something to inspire me and I just write. I never really felt terribly inspired to write about our move until this very moment.   The entire time surrounding our move, I had a real lack of inspiration for writing.  I was feeling tired and stressed and not very inspirational.  Now that it’s over with, and I can look back on it, I realize what a great story it was.

TJ and I were born and raised in the city we were living in. We’d talked about moving a LOT in the years we have been together. We always said we wanted to move south. Those plans never came to life, ever.  Even after several vacations it didn’t feel right.  We talked and talked and talked, and we just never really met eye to eye, or agreed on a location, or went through with it. My brother Shane had been living in Seattle for quite some time since leaving the military. When our father visited him, before he came back to Vermont, he told Shane, “I can’t tell Heather about this place; she’ll move”. Naturally, that peaked my interest right away! I held on to that thought for awhile, allowing it to simmer. I researched Seattle in my own time and didn’t really tell anyone. I wasn’t so sure about big city life, even though I knew where we were living at the time wasn’t nurturing our family.

While in Vermont, I talked to Shane quite often. He’s had a big interest in business in the last several years, so it was often the topic of discussion. He expressed an interest in owning his own company and I made a remark about us moving there and he and TJ could go into business together. I wasn’t totally serious, but I wasn’t totally joking. Maybe I wanted to hear it out loud, to see how it sounded. And how did it sound? Well, it sounded pretty good. We chatted a bit more about it and I left it there. I think I brought the idea up to TJ the following day. Strange. He liked it. We also were not opposed to living in the Pacific Northwest as opposed to South Carolina, (our original destination). Our South Carolina dreams just never culminated, they never quite got to that stage of making it a reality, but this, this was different. It felt different.

A true adventure! Neither of us had actually BEEN to Seattle, much less Washington before. Something in our guts was driving us. Within a month, we, as a family, had decided to make it a reality and go for it. Our house was on the market by July 7th, 2009 and we started packing. Of course no one had any idea of how long it would take to sell our home. The market was awful, it was almost winter and no one sells a house in winter in Vermont!  Then, On November 10th, 2009, we were sitting in a lawyer’s office signing papers. Our house SOLD in 4 months, in the winter and for FULL listing price. We were completely moved out, and ready to go! We had finally cleared the stumbled over all the hurdles.

The best thing we ever did was PLAN!  I’m not a good planner, but we had spreadsheets of everything we needed to get done.  6-8 weeks out, 4-6 weeks out, and so on.  Having that visual guide was a life saver.  Nothing was forgotten and everything moved along in a somewhat orderly slightly less than chaotic fashion.

Everything felt right, even the stressful things like failed inspections and wondering how we were going to buy groceries while we spent our money on renovations and repairs. It all just worked and life went on living just the way it was supposed to. Some of it was difficult, really difficult, but none of it was unexpected. We kept our heads about us, and kept pushing forward. Sometimes I think since having three kids, I’ve actually become *more* spontaneous. I have learned not to sweat the small stuff and quite possibly I’m just too damn busy to be consumed by “what if’s” and other worries. We needed this. We needed to head off into the great unknown. It was a grand adventure and it tested our senses in every way.

To Be Continued…

Part 2