The Moving Gene

By the time I was 7 years old, I was living in my fourth home. My parents couldn't seem to make up their minds about which coast they wanted to live on (east vs. west), and their fickle feelings resulted in a lot of packing and unpacking and moving trucks showing up in our driveway. After the move when I was 7, my parents didn't decide to move again until I was 16, and they managed to hold onto that house until this past spring--a record for them. In contrast, Lena's parents built their house (with their own hands) soon after they got married, and are still living in it today. While my frequent change in environment as a little kid has helped me to catalog my childhood memories (whereas Lena has no idea if something happened when she was 3 or 8), I am often envious of the fact that Lena's parents' house holds so much history for her.

I always planned to stick in one place once I had kids. But apparently the genetic message I got from my parents was stronger than the message Lena got from hers. We are currently living in the fourth home we've lived in since Lukas and Jasper were born 5 years ago, and in a few weeks, they'll be moving into childhood home #5. While I suppose that part of this "move once a year" routine is due to our circumstances (being young, not having money to buy a house, not being totally sure about where we want to put down our roots), I do wonder if there's also a genetic component. My sister, who is 34 years old, is in the process of unpacking and settling into the fourth house she's lived in since her 3-year-old daughter was born. What is this crazy moving gene about?

It's true that I do get kind of giddy about getting a chance to start over again in a new place. I don't hate moving the way my wife does. But our upcoming move is different from those that came before. Generally I find that the "time to move bee" gets stuck in my bonnet in the dregs of winter, when everything feels blah and dark. "Maybe we should move," I'll think to myself. "That would be a good way to add some excitement and change to these monotonous, gray days." But when I convinced my wife that we should move last summer, it was with the understanding that we wouldn't move again until we were moving into OUR house, the house that we would buy, which we couldn't imagine happening for about 3-5 years. And that's what we told our landlord, and our parents, and our friends who rolled their eyes at the news and said, "you better be hiring movers this time." But our most recent decision to move wasn't the result of a bite by the moving bug. Instead, I was stung by the reality wasp.

The house we've been living in for the past 12-and-a-half months is a huge, gorgeous Victorian, 1/2 a mile from downtown. We chose it based purely on location (around the corner from the boys' preschool, walking distance of everything), and we knew from the start that it was more space than we needed (3,000 square feet).
What we didn't know until autumn was that it was more space than we could really afford to heat. We turned off radiators and closed the doors to about half of the house and kept the thermostat at 65° during the day. But the house is so poorly insulated (despite new windows) that our oil bill continued to be astronomical right through until spring. The idea that perhaps we shouldn't stay here for 3-5 years first came to me in December, only 5 months after we'd moved in (usually I last a bit longer than that before feeling the need to move). I had just watched the movie, "The Story of Stuff," and felt disgusted with myself for having bought into the whole consumerism plan and for having managed to accumulate enough stuff to fill a 3,000 square foot house. If we didn't have so much stuff, then we wouldn't need such a big house. And we wouldn't need to heat such a big house. Really, I theorized, we could make do with a room to eat in, a room to play in, and a room to sleep in. I entertained my fantasy of living in a smaller house by spending the winter reading books like "Little House on a Small Planet," which convinced me that we were being hugely wasteful by living in such a large house.

Lena could totally see where I was coming from, but she couldn't believe that I was suggesting that we move again so soon. After a few weeks of my relentless pouting, she agreed that if I found the perfect place, we could move. I spent months looking, but was increasingly discouraged by what I found. We still couldn't afford to buy anything, and the rental market was depressing. By the end of the spring I had resigned myself to staying put in the Victorian, and getting a job to cover the cost of oil.

And then, a month ago, the perfect house landed in our laps. Or rather, my mom moved into her new house (having moved 100 miles to be closer to us) and our perfect house appeared in the yard next door to her house.
It's tiny and cozy, and funky and rustic. The location is dreamy (the Connecticut River on one side, the bike path on the other), and even though it's in the next town over from where we're living now, it's still only 2.5 miles to our current downtown (which is where the kids will be going to kindergarten in the fall).
It's not in walking distance of as many places as our current house is, but it's in biking distance of many more places, and the biking is more kid-friendly (on the bike path), which means that Jaz and Luke will be able to ride their own bikes more. The rent is half of what we're paying now, and I'm sure we'll need less than half the fuel we needed to heat our current house. We'll have my mom next door, and her huge, amazing yard for the kids to run and play in. Before long, we hope to build a barn on her property and get some goats and chickens.

So we're moving again. In a month. And we're doing much more than simply moving, since we're also down-sizing considerably. We need to get rid of at least 1/2 of our stuff (maybe more like 2/3) to fit into the new place. Which feels liberating and fabulous. We will be one step closer to living the dream, listening to our hearts, and practicing what we believe in. But first we need to pack.