An almost-perfect Princeton parting

Well, we've cleared what felt like perhaps the biggest of the hurdles: we moved out of our house this past Wednesday. The girls and I are now in North Carolina with my folks, Tom is on an Appalachian Service Project trip in Virginia, and our stuff is presumably on the back of a truck headed toward Colorado. Getting out this time around was unexpectedly smoother and less painful than our previous adventures in moving, despite a larger family and a longer trek. Tom says I think so only because he spared me most of the heavy lifting, as well as the 100-degree temperatures in the driveway on Monday, when he and his aunts were loading the "relo cubes" in a day-long game of high-stakes Tetris. But in addition, we avoided unpleasant dealings with unscrupulous movers this time, buoyed instead by a steady stream of supportive and incredibly hard-working friends and relatives. And perhaps because it is a cross-country move instead of a cross-town move, we approached the task seriously enough that Tom took some days away from work to attend to it, meaning we stayed on top of the packing game and weren't scrambling at the end. And no one was pregnant this time, which was a huge boost to our collective physical endurance.

We owe thanks to some wonderful helpers:

-First and foremost, Tom's aunts Sharon and Janet, his cousin Katie (I take it back: someone was pregnant this time around, yet she volunteered for this gig), his second cousin Vaughn (who didn't seem to feel that second-cousinhood was a tenuous basis for taking advantage of a person's muscles and goodwill); and our six-year-old niece, Maggie. They came up from Delaware for the heavy hitting on Monday, when we got 90% of our stuff loaded. Tom's Aunt Sharon professes to find packing fun and claimed to enjoy the spatial challenge of getting some 30 pieces of furniture, several bikes, floor lamps, and other odd large items, and hundreds of boxes into four 6' x 7' x 8' "cubes." She and Janet puzzled over the problem in the unrelenting muggy heat all day, while Vaughn helped Tom carry all the furniture outdoors, Katie wrapped endless china pieces indoors, and Maggie hocked snacks to everyone and rescued a few toys from the Salvation Army donation piles that she thought deserved better. She also offered to adopt Edith's pet frogs, helping us with one important outstanding task and relieving us that Mizzy and Lizzy would continue to be part of the family.

When we brought the girls home from school to the near-empty house at the end of the day, Alice stopped in the doorway and exclaimed, "Oh goodness!"

-The piano movers, who came when they said, did what we needed, charged what they quoted, and generally were quick and professional at getting my grandmother's spinnet secured in one of the cubes.

-The various people of Princeton who carried away every single free item we put out at the curb, from the old-fashioned push mower to the potting soil.

-My department chair and 'cross-the-street neighbor, who chose this past Monday to have his house painted. About halfway through the afternoon we still hadn't found anyone either through Craigslist or at local charities who was able to take our loveseat, our biggest and heaviest piece of furniture and one we'd decided not to bring with us. Various people were interested in it but didn't have the means to haul it, or couldn't come for it until July. After noting our success at getting rid of smaller items at the curb, we finally shrugged and decided to put out the sofa, too, to see what happened. Tom and Vaughn heaved the beast to the front lawn and returned inside, panting. Meanwhile the painters across the street, who had been watching, asked me if we really were getting rid of the couch. I assured them we were. Before Tom and Vaughn had so much as poured a glass of water, the sofa had crossed the street and was disappearing into a van. The next day the painters took our dining room table and chairs.

-Our church friend, Lori, who came Tuesday when we were facing that last 5% of the job that seems to take 50% of the time. (A metaphor for knitters out there, it occurs to me that the last part of the move is like finishing a sweater. You've knit up a front and a back and two sleeves and look at the pieces excited that you're nearly done, just the minor matter of seaming, weaving in ends, and blocking left. And then that final finishing work winds up taking as long as knitting the pieces in the first place.) Lori finished packing the kitchen, cleaned inside the cabinets and drawers, and spackled all the nail holes in the house, while keeping me cheerful with her lively conversation.

-Friends Ashley and Jen, who came down to Princeton on Tuesday night when the house was echoing and almost empty, the girls were a bit frenetic, and we were still scratching our heads over the final piles of stuff that didn't seem to shrink, as we nervously eyed the remaining space in the cubes. Ashley and Jen have just this year relocated from the West Coast to New Jersey, and leaving as they arrive seems so unfortunate. But to have them there on our final night felt like passing the Jersey torch to these excellent and dearest of friends.

-The weather gods, who held rain in abeyance during all this loading, and who to our great surprise brought a sudden break in the heat in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Tom and I were sleeping on the Aero bed in the back room, where we'd been in search of a cross-breeze. We haven't had air conditioning (or heat) at our house for several months, since black mold attacked the basement in the wake of the flood and all the insulation had to be torn out. Monday and Tuesday mornings we'd woken up feeling like we were swimming through the air, night having brought no relief from daytime temperatures. Alice and I slogged to Dunkin Donuts at 6am Monday morning in search of a little relief. But Wednesday, when we'd thought any memory of spring had long vanished, we actually woke to find ourselves huddled together against a chill...the temperature had dropped into the 60s overnight, and the day dawned sparkling and beautiful.

And so our last day of eight years in Princeton was about as good as any day that involves moving can be. We dropped the girls at school for their last day there, then returned to work through the list of final tasks. We mailed a big package of cloth diapers to the grad school colleague who had lent them to us. I returned my final stack of books to Firetsone Library, thinking about the many, many hours I spent there and knowing how much I will miss that incomparable institution. We purchased a final gift for Edith's teacher--tickets for him and his daughter to Great Adventure for their daddy-daughter week this summer--and stuck them in the card Edith had helped us write.

Then we returned to the house to tackle the tub, the oven, and the fridge. On our way there Tom got a call from our property manager: There had been some mix-up on their end about when we were leaving, and a work crew was on its way to our house to start major renovations on the basement. Yes, that was fine, we said. So while we cleaned and packed various bags for the next six weeks, seven or eight men blasted a trench in the concrete around the perimeter of the basement, using jackhammers and a .22 caliber...something, crying "Fire in the hole!" before particularly loud reports. As we hauled out grocery bags of condiments and a random assortment of cleaning supplies, they hauled out bucket after bucket of concrete bits and dumped them in a growing heap in the driveway. For anyone feeling nostalgic as they face a move, let me recommend having people remove the foundation of the house as you depart. It's wonderful for lending an air of finality to the proceedings.

The only task at which I failed, and which drove me to that kind of irritated desperation that dominated our last move, was trying to replace the doorknob that Bismarck once had mangled in an attempt to get out to the yard when he was sick. The knob was still functional but unlovely, and I had bought a replacement. Alas, the thinga-ma-bobber would not align with the doo-hickey no matter how many times I tried, and the locking device snapped off, and the whole thing was a mess, such that I wound up putting the old knob back on, teeth marks notwithstanding.

We then departed the house, to get the girls and head to the airport. It was our final pick-up from the Dupree Center for Children. Through two homes, two graduate degrees, two jobs, and two children, Dupree has been a constant community for us ever since we first brought Edith to the infant class at six months old. Even as friends have departed the seminary community each year, leaving us bereft at their departure, the teachers and a core of kids have remained at Dupree, and new families have come to to fill the holes. It has meant a great deal to us to have had such a wonderful group of people involved in the formative years of our children's lives--and of our lives as parents--helping make possible everything we do.

So it felt fitting that the two teachers there at the end of the day were the first two we came to know, Ms. Betsy and Ms. Cicianna. They both came over to give us hugs. Everyone lingered; no one wanted to say goodbye. It used to be that Dupree only served seminary-affiliated families and only allowed them access to the daycare's subsidized rates for four years, meaning few kids have been through every class in the five-year program before now. Edith was one of the first. They gave us the fat notebook full of their assessments of her over the years: observations, progress reports, photos, sample artwork and writing, etc. They gave us Alice's skinnier one. In the car later Edith would laugh as I read aloud Ms. Betsy's accounts of her sucking on paintbrushes, playing in the bottom of the exersaucer, and crawling into teacher's laps during meetings. Tom and I would smile at the brief report from Ms. Lois in her second year, noting that one-year-old Edith spoke in full sentences, had an astonishing memory, and was stubborn.

Torrey was absent with bad allergies that day, to his and his mother's distress; the school secretary gave us his home phone number so Edith could call him to say goodbye to her friend of 4.5 years. Ms. Betsy hugged Alice one final time and told her she would miss her. Then she said that the whole school was going to miss our family. Which made us feel warm and loved, even if it could hardly be as true of their feelings for us as our feelings for them.

So we drove away in the sunshine, encountering enough I-95 traffic to make us eager to escape that aspect of the region, at least. For once we weren't traveling light, and the fee for our checked baggage was more than the airline tickets themselves. We said goodbye to Tom, and I lugged Alice, a carseat, two carry-ons, and a purse through two terminals to the last gate on the hall, Edith dragging along beside. A church friend who stopped by earlier in the day had warned us that Edith's feelings about moving were likely to bubble up in odd ways at unpredictable moments. She had been pretty sanguine all week, but as the girls drew pictures while we waited to board the plane, Edith suddenly burst into loud sobs, "I can't draw a SMILE!!" The smiles in her drawing looked fine to me, but as other passengers stared, I just gathered her into my arms and held her.

She was smiles again herself once we arrived and saw Grandpa. And back to herself--for the moment--the next morning when she came in to wake me up. I asked what she had been up to. "Well I saw a picture in Grandpa and Mor-mor's bathroom that I think must be by Degas. So I'm looking around the house for others by him."

Alice meanwhile is trying to keep track of all her people, asking every morning when she wakes up where each relative is, starting with Daddy. I told her the first morming that he was back in New Jersey. Now she has expanded on that answer and provides it for herself: "Daddy? Daddy in Joohsy, b-ball." Tom is apparently tied up at the world's longest baseball game...but she doesn't seem to begrudge him the leisure time. He'll be glad to hear it.

And so we'll see what's next for these 100% Jersey girls. Edith's kindgergarten teacher surely will be recommending accent therapy by October.

***

P.S. This post was about the actual move, but I can't sign off without mentioning some special occasions in our final pre-moving days. Last Saturday we were headed to Delaware for a family birthday party and decided, for our last drive down there, to go by way of Cape May and the ferry across the Delaware Bay, which docks just a few miles south of Tom's parents' house. It was a beautiful day, and the girls loved the boat ride. We saw dolphins, and Edith counted jellyfish all the way across. The birthday party itself was fun, too, allowing a final afternoon of fun for all six Lank cousins and hopefully not too much chaos for the residents of Aunt Eleanor's retirement home.

The next day was our last day at church. Church folks have been saying goodbye over the past few months in many kind cards, dinners, and little farewell moments. On that last Sunday morning the senior pastor called me up to join Tom at the end of the service. They gave us an extraordinarily generous gift from the congregation, as well as a beautiful pitcher and bowl that were hand-crafted for Tom by our organist, the symbol of a deacon minister's life of service. Then they called up other people who laid hands on us and prayed for us in our next step on the journey. We feel so blessed to have such a congregation behind us as we go. Throughout my life it has been the communities of special people that have mattered most. In Princeton that was our church and our daycare, as well as the broader seminary student neighborhood. Such community doesn't always happen: we didn't find that at the university in the same way and did not have many goodbyes to say there. But I'm hopeful new special communities await in Colorado and that we can draw on the love shown to us in the past to bring something to those we next meet.

P.P.S. Our camera disappeared in the move, either into a box bound for Colorado or, alas, into a Salvation Army donation box. We'll try to rectify the situation soon, but until then I'm afraid I'll be subjecing you to all-text posts.