Occam's Razor

How do you leave one life and start another? It involves lots and lots of boxes and lots and lots of money. And it involves lots of little goodbyes. And maybe it involves saying au revoir, which is not so much a forever goodbye as a temporary goodbye. Some part of me suspects I will be living in the Mid Atlantic again.

That’s not in the plan. The plan is to retire to Massachusetts. Yes, we constantly get sideways looks: you are supposed to move south when you retire. Yet my parents didn’t. They moved from Florida to Michigan. We really don’t know anyone where we will be living except for Craig and Roger. Craig is the realtor that sold us on Northampton when we spent two nights there a couple of years ago and asked to look around. And Roger is a client of mine across the Connecticut River in Amherst, who introduced us to Joe’s Cafe in Northampton where the pizza is so legendary it’s hard to get a seat.

We move in part because we can and in part as an act of love. For thirty years of marriage my wife has complained about Northern Virginia. Finally with retirement I can fulfill her wish to escape the whole area. I am dubious that the climate there will agree with her. She is very weather sensitive. Weather changes seem to trigger muscular pains, headaches and even sinus infections. Maybe there will be less of that up there, in part because the seasons are better defined. Here spring often lasts about a week then feels like summer, but then it may revert to spring for a few weeks and occasionally will even revert to winter. It’s a schizophrenic place to call home, but for however short spring turns out to be, it is beautiful. I doubt we will find such an intense spring further north.

With about a week to go until the moving van arrives, all semblance of our home is gone. Pictures are off the walls. Boxes occupy floors and stuff closets. Some boxes are still to be assembled. Most of these boxes have been used in moves before. When we put out the word that we were moving, it wasn’t hard to find people with boxes to unload. Some came off FreeCycle, but many came from friends at my church. Thanks to a general decluttering that started six months ago, boxing is straightforward. We spend a couple of hours a day at it. There actually is not much more to do. Most of the rest must wait until the very end.

Boxes must be carefully loaded, sealed and marked, for we are not moving once but twice. Most of our property will go into a storage unit. Stuff to fill out a bedroom, study and a living room will go into an apartment in Easthampton, Massachusetts. We’ve come up with a system: transparent wrapping tape for the long term storage boxes, red masking tape for the short term stuff that will go into the apartment. We have a 10×20 foot storage unit reserved. So the long-term stuff will have to be unloaded into it first, then they will move the rest into our apartment. If we fill up the 10×20, there is a cage in the basement of our apartment complex that can take the overflow.

Moving has made me appreciate the value of money. It neatly solves lots of complex problems. However, it takes a pile of money to actually move, at least if you are moving four hundred miles. It’s not something you are likely to try yourself with a U-Haul. The cost of transporting, loading and unloading all our stuff will be around $5000. Money gets you a storage unit rental, and writing four figure checks in advance gets you a place to stay for a few months. The Internet also vastly simplifies the moving process. You can scope out neighborhoods and services from afar. It’s hard to remember how we did this stuff in a pre-Internet age.

Some stuff about moving remains as much of a hassle as it has always been. I can change my address electronically now with the post office, but it still takes about as much time as if I went there in person and filled out a form and it costs you $1.10 to do it online. All our various service providers need notification that you are closing or establishing services and for the most part you can’t do it online. Take Verizon, our Internet and cable provider. Their website tries to do pretty much everything online, but you can’t disconnect your service online, not that this is obvious. I looked and looked but there was no way to do it. It took some searching to figure out what I had to really do: call them on the phone, but only during regular hours. They sure don’t want to make it convenient for you to stop giving them money.

The same was true of our Washington Post subscription, the water company and many others. The sole exception was Dominion Power, where you can stop service easily online. Of course, you don’t get a human very easily when you call these providers. You get an automated telephone tree instead, and it involves listening to boring pronouncements and eventually being put into a queue. A recording sincerely tells you that they are sorry that you have to wait. So you wait and wait and hear bad music. You wish just one provider would state the truth: “Your call is not that important to us. You are being put in a queue because we are too cheap to hire sufficient human beings so that your call can be quickly answered.” Instead, they all lie saying they care when they clearly don’t. I spent one morning doing nothing but waiting for what turned out to be hours to talk to agents.

The hardest part in leaving is not being in a call queue, boxing crap or writing large checks but simply saying goodbye. It’s not that I dislike saying goodbye, but it’s that each goodbye inevitably invokes feelings of sorrow at parting and stokes feelings of regret and that you are making a big mistake. We discussed having a goodbye party, but it was one more thing that we would have to schedule and coordinate and there would be more emotions to process too. Instead, there are lots of little goodbyes. Some happened six months ago when I retired. People come by after services to shake my hand and wish me goodbye. At a board meeting last night there was card, cake and goodies for me. My covenant group will be taking us out to dinner on Monday night.

I go to places and wonder if it will be for the last time. If it is the last time, should it matter? Yesterday I went to the local BJs to pick up a few things and realized I will probably never be back inside that store, where we have been members for 25 years. There we have bought literally tons of stuff as well as emptied our checking account. There will be BJs and Costcos in Massachusetts as well; different faces but it will be largely the same experience.

I deal with all this by trying to tune it out. It is too much. As with the feelings of giving up the perks of my job when I retired, I simply have to let it go at the appropriate time. We will doubtless be back here many times. My father, sister and daughter all live in the area. It’s just that next time we will be in a hotel, or in someone’s bedroom. There will be no home to come home to, but there will be no daunting traffic to navigate either. So there is some joy as well as sorrow that will come with moving. Once all the hassle of multiple moves is over our new life is likely to be much simpler, less costly and far more convenient.

Still, the Washington region has defined roughly half of my life. It’s going to be hard to let it go. Which makes me wonder if I’ll be living here again someday. Should I lose my spouse, will I have incentive to stay in New England? Or will I like lots of aging adults simply choose to be closer to family? If so then I will be back. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, it’s time to pack another box.