The Tenth Circle of Hell

We finally finished packing up our house yesterday. Remind me never to live in a four bedroom house again. Also remind me that just because I see something free on the curb does not mean I should take it home and find a use for it (see Dumpster Diving in Deltona, Parts 1 and 2). This week we left our own pile mountain of junk treasures out in front of our house. Actually, we did it multiple times, and each time the stuff, whether it was a duct-tape repaired beach umbrella or a large rubbermaid tub full of dirty old scratchy towels, it was all gone within hours, if not minutes. If you haven’t lived in Deltona, it’s hard to imagine, but there was very little left at the end for the garbage man. Which I applaud, because that means less of it goes to the landfill. Still, sometimes I wonder if we should all stop endlessly passing the junk around. Sorry I neglected to take a photo of the mountain of trash, but you didn’t really want to see it anyway, and I definitely don’t want to see it again.

Moving is the worst. I hate it with a fierce passion. But paradoxically, the longer you go between moves, the worse it is to move when you finally do move. I guess the only real solution to that is to never move at all. Maybe that will happen to me someday. It could happen. I hope it does.

I did spend some time walking around the house and crying once it was all empty. It’s weird. I never particularly wished to move to Florida, and while it was a very nice house, I was never terribly attached to it. In fact, this is where I decided that I absolutely hate living in the suburbs. Living in a housing development with an HOA gives me a special kind of desperate angst. It’s like all my deepest fears and suspicions are incarnated in the landscape. And the fact that it all looks so deceptively, devastatingly innocuous, so . . . pretty, makes it all the more ominous. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Because there’s this:

“Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.”

And this too:

“Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small,
Then we can never get away from the sprawl,
Living in the sprawl,
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains,
And there’s no end in sight,
I need the darkness someone please cut the lights.”

Those are lyrics that have run through my head so many times as I sat on my manicured lawn looking down the rows of nice little identical houses. So it was hard to explain to myself my sudden attachment to the house just as we were leaving and I had finally finished emptying it out of all my ridiculous belongings. I guess it was partly that I was saying goodbye to all the things that have happened to me in that house–these three years of our lives that have passed here. Axa was just seven years old when we moved here. I was a stay-at-home mom. We were staunch Mormons. We’d spent the previous year living in Tunisia, and the future was hazy. It all seems like forever ago. And yet, the time has passed almost in the blink of an eye.

I think one of the things that makes moving so emotional for me is that it sets two powerful impulses against each other–my fear of change, and my simultaneously rabid craving for it. Anything could happen in the future, especially if the future is going to happen somewhere new and strange. It’s terrifying. And exhilarating. And it’s coming at me like a steam-roller.

So anyway. Enough amateur psychology. My socially aware self realizes that my privilege is talking here. First world problems, and all that. In any case, even though it was rough, I’m happy that we’re done packing up the house.  For the next several weeks I’ll be staying at a cute little bed and breakfast in Deland, run by an English couple. Here’s my home sweet home for the next few weeks:

It’s a classic old Florida house, with a big wrap-around porch (complete with rocking chairs and a swing) and wavy glass windows. I had my first yummy English breakfast this morning, and here’s my cute little room, which is on the bottom floor on the left in the photo above. You can see my teddy bear is already getting cozy.

One thought on “The Tenth Circle of Hell

  • February 14, 2015 at 11:56 pm
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    Very cute place to stay! I enjoyed reading this. I can’t believe you were there three years. Have I followed your blog that long? Wow! 🙂 Best wishes on your new move. I wonder how life in Amsterdam will change you.

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