It’s an interesting world, this world of selling a house and looking for a new one, of deciding whether your life is best lived somewhere other than where you have been for 20 years, or in your current home, where you think, but cannot possibly know, you would be happy for the next 20.
Does staying mean you are honoring some intrinsic value that you alone hold for your place of residence, or is it an inability to step into a different vision for your life? Does not moving mean being deeply committed to who you are, or deeply committed to avoiding change? These are the kinds of questions on my plate these days, questions to which my husband’s answer is simply, “Let’s move. Yesterday.”
The moment your house appears on the real estate website Trulia, you become aware of how many people you know who are also buying, selling or thinking about it. It’s like when you learn a new word and suddenly see it everywhere. My hairdresser is thinking about it. So are many of our art fair friends. Just last week I got an email from my graduate school professor, whom I haven’t heard from in over two years.
“We’ve finally sold our house,” it said, nothing more. Every conversation I have is now about moving, including a particularly exhausting one I have with my imaginary future self, who can’t seem to tell me whether or not moving has made her happy.
Putting your house on the market also means stepping onto a kind of public stage. It’s like pregnancy: the swell in my belly, the container of my house dreams, now belongs to the world; everyone, it seems, has their finger on the pulse of my move. I’m reminded of my three-month engagement when everyone including my plumber had something to say about marriage, most of it negative.