It is the calm before the storm.
Detritus washes up against the downstairs baseboards and spills off of chairs. There are deep indentations where furniture used to stand. Upstairs my suitcase is half full, waiting. The refrigerator gets emptier and emptier. I am Housewife, Interrupted.
My clever husband figured out a way to get under our weight limit. We were a thousand pounds over, which would have meant paying out of pocket for the excess, not exactly a happy prospect. His buddy, the guy that stayed here for about a week while waiting for a room, has hardly anything to move and is also PCS-ing to the same base.
Yesterday they shifted a lot of our furniture onto the brand new car trailer and trucked it off to the other fellow's storage unit. When he gets moved to his family's new home, our stuff will get trucked back to our new home.
I hope to goodness our realtor does not have to show the house today, because it is a wreck. The downstairs just looks sad. People continue to call about the house, but more than a few have been turned off by the neighborhood.
I can't blame them, it took me months before I felt comfortable walking outside. It will have to be a unique type of person to rent this house. It will have to be someone who came, like Keith and I did, from the school of hard knocks. It can't be any subdivision hot house flower type.
Unfortunately, that type would appreciate all the work Keith has put into the inside, but couldn't possibly face the HUD house right across the street. If I had kids, I wouldn't like it either.
Oh well. If we lower the rent even further, the sheer deal of it will attract people, especially in this market. We have something cooking up on the current rent level, if that falls through, lower the rent it will be.
There will be no profit, we will be paying in to it, but as long as we get in a new Congress and they start paying down the debt and therefore avoid financial melt down, it should be fine. It's such a strange thing to know so clearly the link between what Congress does and my own future, as well as the future of my children. It makes politics stand out vividly in my mind. To that end, I am watching today's elections very closely.
I was waiting for Keith to clear CIF yesterday and got bored. I have a little journal I keep in my purse, so I fished it out and read through it.
9/9/08
"Darling, today I had to suddenly bury my face in your beret. I looked around at our bedroom; all was quiet and clean, all the surfaces glowing and warm, the familiar bedspread, my book and I thought, I am a lucky woman...I have a husband who loves me and misses me every second you are away and soon you'll be beside me, in the dark, curled up...I knew in that moment, without a doubt, that you'd come back and we would go forward in our lives with all its quiet pleasures. But even now, Darling, I have so much to be thankful for..."
I remembered that moment, as I read the entry again, and I had to take stock. Here we were, in November almost three months out of the deployment, almost a year and three months married, clearing post and moving to our first new home together.
He came out of the building, I recognized his face at once and I remembered all over again what it was like to see his face for the first time at the Welcome home ceremony and the way he walked to me, so masculine, chewing gum, massive shoulders, worn out ACUs.
"I just left," he said, as he got into the truck beside me. "There were forty more people in front of me, I couldn't make you wait that long. You wouldn't believe what some people are missing, there are people in there with entire duffel bags of stuff that got kicked back..."
(Just for the record, because he is so proud of himself for doing it, he cleared CIF almost entirely in one go and was missing only shoulder straps for something or other.)
Moving is an undeniably miserable process, but there is one good thing about it. It makes clear that everything is replaceable but the person one is moving with. Everything else is just flotsam that moves around the central players, who are thrown together closer through the process.
Speaking of the process, I have a great deal to do and had better get started.
