For the last two weeks we’ve been living in the basement of our new house.
I had been hugely disenchanted with my Seattle flat ever since I witnessed one of my neighbors – the one I have to have the most to do with – tell another of my neighbors to fuck off. It wasn’t only that event that caused the disenchantment; it was a number of things. But when the neighbor you have to do the most neighbor business acts like it’s okay to tell another neighbor to fuck off, you start wondering who’s next and when it will be your turn. It was a defining moment in that it made clear the need for action. You know when you’re lying in bed awake and you ought to just get up because you know the alarm is going to go off? You don’t get up. You just lie there thinking, jeez, I should get up. And the alarm goes off and finally you do. Your neighbor tells your other neighbor to fuck off and it wasn’t directed at you, but you fuck off just the same.
When I found the new house, husband was back in Austria. I’m in a “down on Europe” phase. Bored with small towns and cows, bored with Austrian formality, bored with lack of opportunity out there in the Ennstal, even bored with bucolic beauty. I wanted the company of people who speak my language – not in a “we both speak English” sort of way, rather, in a “let’s go for Thai food with our gay friends” sort of way. While husband was thinking in Euros, my real estate agent friend would bundle me into the car and we’d roam the neighborhoods of Seattle looking at craptastic property after craptastic property. It was depressing until it wasn’t. I found a place I wanted, didn’t get it, and then it was depressing again.
Then we found The House. In order to make the sale easy, we had to put the property in my name only. This meant that husband had to work a magic trick and show up in Seattle in time for closing, and preferably, stay long enough should his signature be needed for the sale of the flat. In a stunning coup, he arrived the Friday before our Monday closing date and was able to get three months leave for “special family circumstances,” though not before being questioned by his boss about why his wife insisted on living someplace as absurd as Seattle. He explained the lack of job opportunities, but glossed over the boredom issues.
For two weeks before husband arrived in Seattle, I packed and shuffled household goods from flat to house in my old Tercel. The old boy (my brother, in a fit of genius, calls the car Theodore Terzel) holds a shocking amount of stuff. I didn’t want the movers touching the artwork or the tableware, so that all went into the garage beforehand. Then, on moving day, a truck and two really strong humans came to get the rest of the stuff and piled it into the basement where we now spend our days.
We have an electric tea kettle and a camp stove. Over the weekend, two friends who just moved in together brought us their extra microwave, thank you very much. Our “real” kitchen is a mess of tape and paper and buckets and scrapers. The shower is usable, but you step out on to a brown paper covered floor. Our clothes are in suitcases and the other day, when I had to dress somewhat properly to go on a job interview, I had to crawl over piles of boxes looking for one that was labeled “shoes.”
We’re delegated to the “big room” in the basement and our laundry room/makeshift kitchen while the painters get rid of the pink and blue color scheme that someone thought was a good idea. When I get up in the morning, I make coffee using the espresso machine that is plugged in next to the dryer. Then I shuffle upstairs with the laptop and sit there in my jammies until the painters arrive.
Yesterday I went to my flat to get rid of some wood scrap and then I stopped by the basement painting studio to pick up my paints and the work in progress. I still have a few things here and there scattered about the city and this doesn’t even begin to address the stuff I have back in the Ennstal. Sometimes I look for something that I am absolutely convinced I have in Seattle and then, when I talk to husband, he says, oh, no, it’s right here in the kitchen in the Ennstal.
The weirdest thing about this, about the bedroom/office/TV room in the basement, about the stuff scattered everywhere, about the barely adequate kitchen, the sense that we have no idea where anything is and what we are doing and where we are living right now, today, the weirdest thing about all of this is that it seems perfectly normal. We are completely comfortable.
You have moved to another country because you wanted to. You liked it there. You moved on. Why did you do that? Or why did you want to and didn't do it after all? (I don't mean "my visa expired")
I found myself thinking more and more about moving on, but don't want to make the mistakes I did when I came to Vienna. But thinking too much causes fear and fear causes gridlocks.
How did you handle that? And what were the wins and losses?