So young

Today is our tenth wedding anniversary (add six or so years to that to get the full total). K gave me the most beautiful cards this morning (we rarely give anniversary gifts, and this year we agreed that since we’re buying each other a house and lots of other things to go inside of it, we could skip the recommended tin items). Naturally we both wrote a bit about the journey in our cards, but K took the time to reflect on the fact that we are back in the city where we met, and the city in which we were married. I had to remind myself that we’ve never lived in Michigan during the time that we’ve been married – we lived in New York the whole time, even though we were married here. This is our first anniversary living in the place where our journey began.

K also reminded me that despite how awful things have been feeling these past few weeks, and all of the moments in which I’ve found myself saying “I don’t want to live here – I want to go back.” We have to believe that this is where we are supposed to be right now. It doesn’t feel that way, but I need to try to believe it.

My dad has been urging me to call Roberta and push her for a closing date on the house, since we foolishly signed a purchase agreement that said something along the lines of “early October.” He said that it’s because he wants to make sure that we’re able to book painters and flooring contractors immediately upon closing, but I’m fairly certain that the real reason is because he wants us out of his house as quickly as possible. I can’t say that I blame him – we want to be out of here too, but it still makes for an unpleasant living situation when you’re aware that your hosts wish that you weren’t there. So I called Roberta and she said that we can tentatively close on the 10th of October, and get painters in by the 13th. My dad then reminded us that since we’re putting in wood floors, the wood will have to sit in the space for two weeks before it can be installed. That pushes our move date back significantly later than we’d hoped, and we found ourselves feeling so despondent about the next ten+ weeks that we actually discussed breaking our contract and buying a different house. We came to our senses pretty quickly when we realized that most closings happen no sooner than 30 days out, and that we wouldn’t likely get in THAT much earlier, particularly since we didn’t have another house in mind.

Ever since we signed the contract I’ve had my sights set on Halloween in our new neighborhood: I pictured us trick-or-treating there and could imagine sitting on the front stoop handing out candy to neighborhood kids, meeting new neighbors as we go. But it’s starting to look like that’s an ambitious target date. I’m super bummed at the prospect of ten more weeks of living out of suitcases in someone else’s space. All of our coats and warm clothes are packed away in boxes in the garage of our future home, and I probably allowed that to happen because of my wishful thinking that we’d be in well before we needed them. Still, I recognize that ten more weeks in the context of ten years of marriage should be small potatoes, and that the next ten years in that house (god willing, because we never want to move again) will be worth it.