leaving New Jersey
Jul. 31st, 2022 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingI drove down to NJ Saturday evening/night, and returned to Ithaca this afternoon. The purposes of this trip were threefold:
1. Drop off my air mattress so Nick will have a place to sleep after the movers take away the beds. Nick has also contributed his own air mattress to the cause. His is a queen, so our parents will use that one. Mine is a twin because I don't have infinite floor space. *wry*
2. Pick up some items that are now mine (some embroidered wall art from the 1890s, a small travel cooler, some cleaning supplies, my grandmother's old creative writing, etc.) and one last batch of donations for the Friends of the Library book sale.
3. Say goodbye to the house. We moved there in April of 1986, when I was just four years old, so I have a LOT of memories tied up in that building and yard.
For example, when we moved in, there was a small oak tree in the back yard that was only about two feet taller than I was (remember: I was four years old; this was a TINY tree). It's now significantly taller than the house.
Or there's a spot in the yard that now looks no different from any other patch of grass, but for a good five years or so it was a bare patch of dirt because Nick and I once decided to dig a hole to China and got a good four feet down before anybody stopped us. (We then wanted to turn it into a secret cave fortress, but our parents said that wouldn't be safe or stable and made us refill all the dirt.)
Or there's the basement where Nick and I used to roller skate on the bare concrete floor between Dad's bookshelves and pretend to either be Venetian gondoliers (using mops for poles) or knights jousting at King Arthur's court (with the assistance of one mop and one hideous and floppy homemade hobby-horse we'd acquired from god-knows-where).
And the raspberries in the far back yard; the locust tree next door whose seed pods Mom used to pay me and Nick a dollar a bag for collecting off our lawn; the weird un-floored edges of the attic that were hidden behind shelves and clothes racks and mysterious shadows; the place the swing-set used to stand; all the trees that grew and died over the decades (the pussy willow, the Queen Anne cherry, the fifty-foot apple tree that was far too tall to harvest, the Douglas fir, the row of hemlocks along the back of the property, the assorted Japanese maples, the awful poplars whose leaf casings exuded the stickiest substance known to humankind; etcetera, etcetera); the weird stone pool completely surrounded by dogwoods and ivy that we used as a yard waste pit for twenty years until it was full and well-composted, at which point Dad covered it and built a shed using the pool rim as a foundation; and and and.
...
I've been slowly saying goodbye to the house itself over the past decade, as my childhood bedroom became a miscellaneous storage room and various other rooms and furniture shifted around, but I got a little sniffly walking around the yard this afternoon with Dad before I packed my car and headed home.
...
It's going to be really weird not to have New Jersey as an anchor point anymore.
1. Drop off my air mattress so Nick will have a place to sleep after the movers take away the beds. Nick has also contributed his own air mattress to the cause. His is a queen, so our parents will use that one. Mine is a twin because I don't have infinite floor space. *wry*
2. Pick up some items that are now mine (some embroidered wall art from the 1890s, a small travel cooler, some cleaning supplies, my grandmother's old creative writing, etc.) and one last batch of donations for the Friends of the Library book sale.
3. Say goodbye to the house. We moved there in April of 1986, when I was just four years old, so I have a LOT of memories tied up in that building and yard.
For example, when we moved in, there was a small oak tree in the back yard that was only about two feet taller than I was (remember: I was four years old; this was a TINY tree). It's now significantly taller than the house.
Or there's a spot in the yard that now looks no different from any other patch of grass, but for a good five years or so it was a bare patch of dirt because Nick and I once decided to dig a hole to China and got a good four feet down before anybody stopped us. (We then wanted to turn it into a secret cave fortress, but our parents said that wouldn't be safe or stable and made us refill all the dirt.)
Or there's the basement where Nick and I used to roller skate on the bare concrete floor between Dad's bookshelves and pretend to either be Venetian gondoliers (using mops for poles) or knights jousting at King Arthur's court (with the assistance of one mop and one hideous and floppy homemade hobby-horse we'd acquired from god-knows-where).
And the raspberries in the far back yard; the locust tree next door whose seed pods Mom used to pay me and Nick a dollar a bag for collecting off our lawn; the weird un-floored edges of the attic that were hidden behind shelves and clothes racks and mysterious shadows; the place the swing-set used to stand; all the trees that grew and died over the decades (the pussy willow, the Queen Anne cherry, the fifty-foot apple tree that was far too tall to harvest, the Douglas fir, the row of hemlocks along the back of the property, the assorted Japanese maples, the awful poplars whose leaf casings exuded the stickiest substance known to humankind; etcetera, etcetera); the weird stone pool completely surrounded by dogwoods and ivy that we used as a yard waste pit for twenty years until it was full and well-composted, at which point Dad covered it and built a shed using the pool rim as a foundation; and and and.
...
I've been slowly saying goodbye to the house itself over the past decade, as my childhood bedroom became a miscellaneous storage room and various other rooms and furniture shifted around, but I got a little sniffly walking around the yard this afternoon with Dad before I packed my car and headed home.
...
It's going to be really weird not to have New Jersey as an anchor point anymore.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-01 08:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-01 09:19 pm (UTC)