Green and white houses
MANHATTAN — The door to the U-Haul slammed in front of the house and Lando barked from the bedroom inside.
The poor guy had been in there all night.
I walked around back and into the barren house, the door closing behind me echoing off walls built in 1900. We’d arrived in Manhattan from the move around 9:45 the night before. And the original plan was to unpack a bed and sleep on the ground. But we’d run out of the daylight and energy. So instead, in the dark, we parked, let the dog in the yard, he somehow escaped, the horn of a train wailed close by and food at Chipotle needed to be picked up in two minutes before the place closed. At 10 p.m. — after eating dinner criss-cross on the floor — we realized we didn’t have the time to unpack. Couldn’t even if we wanted to thanks to technology glitches and paperwork. So we left the dog in his kennel, stayed at a hotel 7 minutes away for 9 hours and the next morning he and I walked into the yard of our new home.
The dog was uninterested in anything but water and his food. I tried to play fetch with his red ball, but he declined. He just sniffed around this yard. He could tell it was different.
So could I.
My wife and I loved Omaha, but man did we especially love our home. It was just 672 square feet — a shoebox in midtown — but we didn’t like leaving it. It was cramped and the speaker from the shower could be heard throughout the house. You could plug the vacuum in one side of the house, and get to the other.
It was the first home my wife and I shared, and we loved every inch of it. We loved the patio, where we often played games in the summers and grilled. We loved the living room, where we lounged on the floral couch and watched all of Criminal Minds, football and Disney Movies. In that room, we read books. We put on records and played Yahtzee. It was a dining room, too, the living room. And we sat at a small table about yard long, and ate dinners by candlelight because there were no light fixtures on the ceiling.
Leaving that house was the hardest part about leaving Omaha. And now, I was up early to let the dog out into this new yard, in this new home, in this new city, and it all felt so strange.
I’ve often been anti-moving. My parents recently moved out of my childhood home and I’m over it now — I really am — but for about 18 months I couldn’t get over it. Didn’t like that someone else was living in the place I grew of age. I came up with this theory that every home should be a new one. That, after someone lives in a house for 3 or more years, they have the option — even if they are not the owners — to burn the place to the ground. Just a ceremonial burning. And then the next people to live in the house could build a new place right on top of the ashes. It’s only fair. Those were my memories in those spaces. Who gives you permission to be there, now?
And I thought of that as — on Friday night around 6 p.m. — I jumped up in the U-Haul and said goodbye to that white, 672 square foot house. Waved goodbye to the stairs leading up to it where we hauled our first three Christmas trees. To the little tree I had to maneuver around while mowing. Said goodbye to the front door, where we looked out to see the rain and the sunsets.
The rest of the moving crew showed up at the Manhattan house — a green little thing on the corner — around 10 a.m. Soon, hands were grabbing our things and placing boxes all around the house. We grabbed the twin bed and the queen bed and the coffee pot and the floral couch, and the new dining room table and the old books and the new TV with the old posters. And after two hours it was all inside this new place.
“Starting to look alright,” I told my wife. She grinned. Now was the fun part. Arranging. (Bless her.)
When the moving party left we lounged and — after four days of non-stop packing and moving — I took a top 10 all-time nap, Lando snuggled right under my armpit, still not used to the new floors and the yard.
I awoke and we ordered Chinese takeout. We planned the rest of the night of moving. We’d get the bedroom set up, set up the closet, then watch a movie. My wife put on some music. I looked out the window. Storm clouds were rolling in.
The rain blew the tree in the front hard, and the water rushed down the street by the elementary school we now live caddy-corner from.
After about 30 minutes, the sun broke through. So — like the old home — I looked out the front. Two rainbows were towering overhead. If you looked at the right angle, it looked like it was landing right on our house.
A welcome. A sign, if you want to look too far into things, that this was all OK.
I took a few photos then dried off, and let Lando out to the back. He walked to the side yard, where we couldn’t see. Molly asked that I go look for him again - still wary from his escape the night before - so I did, and he darted away, directly to his red ball, the one he refused to play with earlier.
I grabbed it from him and we began a round of fetch, our first in this yard. But the routine came back to the both of us. And above, the clouds from the storm had broken, and the sunset poked through, and above was painted an ironically purple sky.
The lush green yard was dewy. The house so green.
I do not know what lies before us in this house. But after weeks of stress, after an entire day of wondering what in the world we were doing, it made me hopeful that the same joy 672 square feet gave us in Omaha could be duplicated in an old green home a bit bigger a bit further away, and made me glad no one burned this down before, so we could see the view from above and believe of the view in the future.
Work?
So, first of all, thanks for subscribing. It’s very cool of you. Secondly, in case you haven’t heard, I left my job this week at the Omaha World-Herald. My wife and I now live in Manhattan, Kansas, and I’m out of the (professional) writing biz. I’ll be attending KU this fall to get my master’s in journalism. I’ll also be a graduate teaching assistant, which will be great. Anyway, the plan is to make this newsletter more of a thing. I know I’ll miss writing, so I’ll probably take that out on this. Because of that, I want to devote more time to this newsletter. I’ve been thinking a lot about what this newsletter will be, and right now I think it’ll just be things I feel moved to write about. But if you have any other ideas of what it could/should be, let me know. cheady0404@gmail.com. Thanks again for reading.
Best Thing I Read This Week:
The Worst-Case Scenario, published in The Washington Post