Emotional move

In May, my friend Jen wrote a blog post in which she poignantly differentiated between a physical move and an emotional move. What she wrote–and what I have also found to be true–is that the physical move happens and then the emotional move keeps happening. We moved to NC 13 months ago and for the first six months, I felt pretty much uniformly bummed, lonely, and pissed.

Being in a new physical place is hard because the comforts of knowing your physical geography well are absent. It is just unsettling to not know where things are, to get lost going to Target, and to get stuck in traffic and not know any better. It’s also hard because you don’t run into people you know, you’ve left behind an entire community available for spontaneous social interaction, and even if there are people you know in your new location, they have their own social rhythms established. Sometimes they want to incorporate you into them and welcome you to everything (in these cases their kindness overwhelms you to the point of tears) and sometimes they don’t. The emotional move is less financially expensive and physically taxing, but it lasts much longer.

But it does get better. At 13 months out, North Carolina feels like home. Our animals are settled and happy. We have art hanging on the walls. Communities around yoga, work, the gym, and our town have emerged. In some ways, we still really miss Nashville, especially the food and our family and family of friends, but our life here is rich and, for the most part, lovely.

Dry laundry for free

When we moved into the house we’re in now—a rambling, 1970s rental ranch-style home, complete with dark wood paneling and the occasional mouse—one of the features that sold us was the amazing yard. It is a long rectangular lot, but it is completely fenced, which is perfect for the doggie, and it also came complete with clothesline poles.

Eager to start drying clothes, I chose a bad type of cable that started to fray, which we replaced with just regular clothesline (duh! should have done that from the start). Then, one of the poles started to lean due to a mud patch made by the constant condensation from our house’s ancient heat pump as it struggled to cool the house this summer, so we moved the poles to a different and better-suited part of the yard. After a visit from my dad, who led an expert concrete mixing and hole-filling operation, it seems like we’re done messing with it. In spite of the various clothesline iterations, we’ve been drying clothes out there since the late spring, and I am thrilled with the double savings that come with neither using the dryer nor running the AC to combat the heat the dryer makes. Plus, our laundry smells delightful.