Oooof. Moving house isn’t for the faint hearted and I do believe you need to know that I am, without shred of a doubt, faint of heart. For heavens to Betsy the whole shenanigans took twice a long and was twice as kerfuffly as we had imagined and by the time we got into the car to drive out of Manchester and hop counties, back into Lancashire we were almost 99.9% certain that our stay in Ben’s former family property is destined to be a short one, for isn’t it true that we are already missing Didsbury, and have assured the locals we would almost certainly be back within a matter of months?
For oh yes, not content with having moved house twice in the past twelve months, we arrived here on Monday and taking in the scope of the work to be done, decided that life is too short to spend it living somewhere without all the little joys we had grown accustomed to and that we simply haven’t got the energy or executive function to be forestalling life in favour of plaster and sawdust and lo and behold a decision was made to work through all the boxes left in the house, pop what remains into storage and put the house up for sale pronto!
While all this sounds kind of willy-nilly, it is because it is. It seems we are rather willy-nilly people. But the kind of willy-nilly people who have spent our lives trying to do things it seems we cannot, and now finally understand that taking the path of least resistance is the way towards the peace and lifestyle we both know we need right now. And so in the past three days we have sat in the little fairy-lit bedsit I fashioned for us in the huge bedroom, watching as bats swooped across the navy blue sky and talking about all the billions of reasons why this lovely old house, with her gorgeous bones and quirky features, just wouldn’t work for us. Finally sighing in relief when we realised were both on the same page and it is simply ok to admit that we would always be square pegs in a round hole here, should we force ourselves to do what I suppose might be considered the sensible thing in the long run, if all we really wanted in this life was to furnish a box and squirrel away our dreams in the quiet of a town we aren’t inspired by.
So today a storage container was secured and Ben will ferry the first lot of boxes there later this evening, so that potential buyers can walk around unencumbered by the flotsam and jetsam of three different houses piled upon itself. I meanwhile, look like a coal man. For plaster dust gets everywhere, and while I find something deeply romantic about the soft pink of a freshly plastered wall, there is no part of me loving living in its fall out. So imagine if you will, filthy me, standing in a bucket, trying to get my feet clean! Preposterous me marching on the spot whenever I find myself alone, so my bones don’t cease up in the limited space of a house far away from real amenities. Silly me trying to make our time here as joyful as possible by ordering in picnics of pesto hummus and flatbread, peppered salami and lemonade we eat with dirt in our fingernails, squashed on to the little sofa in our little bohemian bedsit with the cats prowling and the dogs downstairs and all things really quite mad and touched by the grief Ben will always be draped in if we did decide to stay here. And eternally optimistic me, ordering a For Sale sign to pop into the garden so that all those in the local community rather desperate for a property so close to the gilded new mosque just down the road, will know that after their asking for so many years, the house will finally be available for sale.
Now though. Writing to you via my phone’s hotspot, grubby and oddly content. Raffy the oldest of the dogs with his head on my knee, and a bottle of water at my side to rid my mouth of the taste of all the 150 years of dirt that fell in from the ceiling when it was being repaired and has been dancing around the air ever since. Ben is out, white with exhaustion from lugging boxes bad for his back around, but buying baguettes to sustain us, and I am charging my Kindle ready to read the evening away looking out at the house with the huge castle style turret across the road, as the bats swoop and a frankly relentless blackbird sings his heart out at all hours of the day and night.
I am trying to live in the moment. I am trying so hard to neither look back, nor to try too hard to see what the future holds. Trying with all my might to make friends with uncertainty. But she is a slippery customer. At once dazzling me with glittery promise and the next fielding the prime minister casually mentioning that as a nation we should be prepared for the possibility of war.
So I am creating anchors in my mind: measures of progress to fasten emotional turbulence on to. Making lists and journalling my dirty socks off as I try to stay firmly in the moment. Laughing at each other as we take baths with baby wipes, and reflecting on how, despite not wanting to stay here for always, there is something about the deep silence of this house that is a kind of nirvana for our safety-seeking neurodivergent minds. How this too, will become a period of time we look back on and while wondering how we survived, see too how much there is to celebrate in being capable of doing hard things and still finding each other hilarious regardless.
I am ok. We are ok. Everything is ok.
But Didsbury? Oh how we miss you.