Moving on Past the Moving Day Blues

You take nothing for granted when you live in an adorable, renovated cottage in Old Town.

“Residential Parking” spots in front of your adorable cottage are snapped up by anyone. Everyone.

Your tiny back deck that is separated by a tall fence is no match for a taller bamboo grove that grows an inch too thick on the very day you move in, thereby snapping the tall fence so that it leans precariously close to crashing onto your deck and likely taking out the back French doors with it when it does.

Direct TV gives you the bad news that there is absolutely no line of sight for the dish unless, “You can knock down the house next to you or cut down all the trees on your neighbor’s side of the back fence. Did you notice it’s snapped in the middle, by the way?”

Comcast shows up exactly on time, sets up basic cable and internet so that it works perfectly, asks if you’d like anything else, to which you reply, “No, we have Direct TV coming.” If only you’d known at that very moment that in two hours, Direct TV was going to happily let you out of the remainder of your contract.

You come to terms with having less than half the space that you had in your previous house, but discover that the total lack of closets in your adorable, renovated Old Town cottage is not so easy to overlook once your clothes are smashed onto wobbly garment racks with no place to put said racks except the middle of the tiny renovated bedroom in which the owner opted out of closets to allow for a more spacious feel.

You allow more than 24 hours for the brand new refrigerator in your adorable, renovated cottage to cool down. When it doesn’t, you throw out most of the food you moved with you, but are inspired and surprised when your landlord has a service technician on your front doorstep within an hour.

You wonder what possessed you to agree to start your new job two days after you moved into your adorable, renovated cottage in which a heap of bins and bubble wrap and furniture that almost fits into the three small rooms is an obstacle course that seems impossible to organize. That would be today that you start, say, in less than two hours.

You despair that you will never find a spot to put your computer, much less feel inspired to write, in the adorable, renovated cottage. Then you take your computer outside to the front porch, settle into one of your rocking chairs–the only pieces of furniture that fit perfectly anywhere in the adorable, renovated cottage–and marvel at having people nod hello as they walk along the sidewalk in front of your house.

The dog settles at your feet, a rooster call to its hen somewhere down the block, a couple waves as they cycle by on a tandem bike. You are encouraged when you realize how much you’ll eventually love your adorable, renovated cottage, that you will hopefully settle into your new job just as soon as the the shock of moving wears off, and that in a vague, odd way, you already feel like you’ve landed at home.