Tomorrow night is the first night in our new digs – my childhood home. Yes, we’re moving in with Mom. The rental truck is reserved, the storage lock-up paid for, my husband is busy packing, and:
I’m nailed to the couch with some sort of horrid further development of tonsil flesh-eating virus.
I will spare you the details of what’s happening physically but let’s just say, it’s not good. Now and then I get up and do a bit of work – making a vegetarian lasagna for Ralph, the family, and my mother; or washing, drying, and folding laundry (I would have to be so incredibly ill not to do laundry; I’m addicted to laundering, which is I suppose an illness of itself). After working a bit and making pathetic self-pitying noises I start to feel rather bad. At this point I pour out hot honey and lemon, or coffee (again, with honey – thought to have medicinal properties, especially thought to have medicinal purposes by my husband – it’s his new “thing”), or a popsicle, and sit back down to the film I’m watching. It turns out being sick is when I catch up on decent cinema, instead of our family repetoire of bad B-movies.
This time tomorrow the house will be empty (but not at all clean – thinking of that work, ugh), and that will feel a little strange, and a little sad. I’ve loved the house – especially the kitchen, the oven which smells better upon baking bread than any oven I’ve known (or perhaps this is the house in which my bread skills have improved). I’ll miss living along a main thoroughfare and the many walks of life I see right outside my window. I’ll miss the greenhouse which is still working on monstrous (about ten feet tall, no joke) tomato plants, I’ll miss my clawfoot tub, and I’ll miss all the food we’ve been finding right in our yard.
I’m ready, though, for the next leg of our journey – shopping for a home, and living off my mother’s charity!