The First [of many posts] about Moving
I don’t talk about it too often here but given where we are right now, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. My husband is a pilot in the Air Force. We are stationed in Alaska - we do not live here by choice. Believe me, I don’t understand why anybody would live here [in Fairbanks] by choice. When I met him back in mid-2009 he had already been assigned here. It was too late to voice my choice for somewhere perhaps a tad warmer, less remote, less weird, less life-altering, less mind numbingly freaking freezing like you can’t imagine. But I digress.
The time has come for us to get a new assignment. I won’t tell you our top three choices because in the end, it doesn’t matter. The Air Force will send us where they need us, or so I’m told. We are in “the waiting period.” We put in our wish list in December. We’ll find out the new assignment at the end of March. All we do now is sit and wait. And escape Alaska for a bit because I’ve definitely reached the end of MY rope; it’s been -40F/C (or colder) for over a week with no end in sight - talk about cabin fever.
We bought a house up here. Well I guess I should say we built a house up here; then we bought it. Last weekend we started what you could call “get ready mode.” We’re going to have to put this house on the market in April or May. Although this house is only 2.5 years old, we’ve got a lot of work to do mostly on the “staging” front.
We started by painting over the “granny apple smith green” wall in babyD’s nursery. The realtor said his room was too personal; that we needed to make it more of a neutral bedroom. We painted it a lighter, more neutral shade of green that took me over an hour to pick out at Home Depot. There’s a fine line between light green and mint chocolate chip green when it comes to trying to find a shade of light green. While Ryan was touching up the trim and babyD was napping, I sat in the glider in the corner of the room and started thinking. I started to feel a little sad. A wave of impending change washed over me. It’s a very complex emotion in a still new-to-me situation. Moving. Leaving. Moving on.
I never moved growing up. I lived in the same house for 18 years. Then I moved to college, but lots of people do that. After college I moved to NYC for grad school, but when you grow up where I did, moving to NYC isn’t a huge deal. The first “real” move I made was from NYC to Alaska. Now, here I am, almost three years later getting ready to move again to…who knows where. I want nothing more/have wanted nothing more since I got here in August 2009 to leave this place and never look back. But it’s a fine line between being sad that it’s ending and being sad that there is an ending. My time in Alaska has not been easy. In fact, many days it was a straight up struggle. But it has still been time. My life moving forward. We had a son here. We lived here. We loved here. No matter how much I hate living here, I guess I’m still sad to be leaving behind a life, a house, a home that we created from the ground up, literally.
Some people that I know look at this Air Force life as an adventure. They think it’s exciting to move every three years and to never know where or when you’re going. I am not one of those people. Sure it’s exciting that we [in theory] could get stationed anywhere in the world. To think that come July or August or September we could [in theory] be living in Germany or England, Arizona or Utah is exciting. But it’s also stressful. We spent three years creating a life here, a home, a family. And then one day in…who knows when…we’ll pack it all up and drive off to…who knows where. It’s like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book except we don’t really get to choose. Maybe that’s the stressful part. Maybe it’s the uncertainty? Maybe it’s the what-ifs? Maybe it’s because for a very visual person, I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in any of those places? Or maybe it’s just because I don’t know. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not an adventure. We would like to plant roots; to sink our feet into the brown earth and let them settle. To live in a house for longer than three years. To actually feel like we fully unpacked and hung all the art in just the right spots. But I guess so long as the Air Force is choosing where we live, that’s not really possible. And I’m okay with that for the time being. Just not forever.
No, not forever.
