Here's where we are

It's a Sunday morning and we're in Arizona. This was going to be our second explore-a-move trip. We scheduled it back in April, along with the Florida trip we took in early May.

I remember the weekend we decided we were going to have to get on a plane and go see and feel the Pasco-Hernando County area in Florida that Bruce was falling in love with on the internet.  I had applied for a job at the community college there. Our early strategy about moving was that I'd apply at community colleges in places we thought we'd like and then we'd see if I got an interview somewhere. Reports from our friends about this north-of-Tampa area weren't great. We heard it was "blue collar." "Tacky." Not at all like the part of Key West we've spent so much time in, or Sarasota where Bruce went to New College.

It was becoming clear to me that we were going to have to make decisions about moving without any job offer. Bruce was staying up every night until 2a.m. looking at real estate on the internet (exactly as he did before we bought our Eden Prairie house in 1999). He was also starting to correspond with residents of the Pasco-Hernando county area--a journalist, a business woman/community activist (who wound up referring us to our Florida realtor)--to find out what living there was like. He would call me in to our office several times each evening to look at various houses he'd found and studied. He was sort of bonding with the area. There came a point when I just said we have to get our feet on the ground there to experience the place, before this goes any farther.

Then our thinking shifted.  We realized that if we could check out an area of Florida we thought we might like--without a job offer but with community colleges in the area--then we could check out parts of Phoenix and Virginia as well.  We scheduled two trips that weekend--Florida and Phoenix. We never got Virginia on the calendar.  As you know, one day in to the Florida trip, we saw Damen Lane in Port Richey.

Here is where we spent so much time thinking and processing and talking those few days in Florida. We used Marriott points to stay here in Clearwater, which was our base as we drove either north or south each day to explore.

You can see a little "tiki roof" on the left at the end of the boardwalk (in the picture with the couple walking). That's an outdoor bar where we had a couple important sessions. And we spent a lot of time talking in the mornings and evenings in the living room--before and after driving around all day.

We covered so much territory on that trip; intense inner landscapes and outward tropical terrain. The first thing I had to get used to in a hurry was that Key West does not equal Florida proper. One of the next things we had to sort out, because we were falling so hard for the Damen house, was that maybe--like our favorite saying "You don't take a trip. A trip takes you."--the same principle applied to what we were contemplating here. You don't make a move. A move makes you. Instead of insisting on figuring everything out ahead of time, maybe the move itself is a kind of alchemy that gets you rearranged. That may sound magical but magical is how the Damen house feels to us. In a psychic reading my friend Kim did for us, she said: "Part of the appeal of this home is that...animals and birds will come right into your yard and they will teach you many things in which you will delight. The animals watch over the burial ground [in what we call "the nature preserve" directly north of us we're told there are Indian burial sites], the old ones watch over the animals--it's a symbiotic relationship. You will have experiences here that you won't be able to explain, but after a while they will seem like everyday occurrences. The house has been "looking for" some humans who will appreciate the beauty and history of its surroundings. No coincidence that this property captured your heart." The magic was already afoot.

Here's where we are right now, in Scottsdale. At a Westin in the lap of luxury. We traded a week of our timeshare to get here.
I spent hours in the tub last night reading about the HBO series Treme in the Sunday NYT magazine.

We have an entire "villa," which is like one big apartment and one little apartment. The big apartment has a full kitchen, the bathroom pictured above (plus a huge shower), a balcony and king-sized bed in the bedroom. The little apartment has its own living room, kitchenette, balcony, queen size bed in the bedroom, and not-as-splendid bathroom. I have the bed in the little apartment for one more night, before Bruce's brother Michael and our soon-to-be official sister-in-law Sheryl arrive tomorrow.

We spent all of yesterday afternoon sitting outside on couches under palo verde trees (drinking a couple mimosas). We had to wrestle with heart vs. head concerns about buying Gulf coast property 40 days into the BP oil volcano. We try like crazy to honor Bruce's "head" concerns about why doing this now is irrational. But our hearts win every time, in every discussion we have.

We need to be sure because the closing date on Damen is May 28th.

Reality

We waited all day to get back our signed purchase agreement contract from the seller of our house today.  At four minutes after midnight, just now, our realtor sent word that she at last has the contract. A 12-day clock starts now for us to complete a building inspection, a bug inspection, a sink hole inspection and a survey.

I'm glad about the contract being finalized--thank you, Mercury, direct yesterday at 5:30pm--but I've spent a lot of today feeling anxious and insecure.  The insecurity is kind of ancient but it got aroused this morning during a phone conversation when I resigned from one of my three teaching gigs. I'd planned to do it but not this morning and not over the phone. I was nervous during the brief conversation and developed a sort of amnesia about what I actually said. I think I had a bit of an out-of-body experience.  The upshot is, I think I was quite appropriate and strong on the phone but I didn't know it until the end of the day. I spent the intervening hours contending with insecurity, anxiety and shame. Which even now I'm still feeling the remnants of in my gut.

The whole episode also made a little more real the fact that I'm moving to Florida in the next few months.  I now listen to the news as though I'm already a Florida resident, tuning in to Charlie Crist's every word and indifferent to calls from the DFL.

Bruce and I call our home Cross Creek.  The real Cross Creek is where Florida author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived and worked and Bruce loves the area. Now we have our own Cross Creek. Reminding myself of how it feels standing on our land is soothing.  But the reality of moving and all it means--no soup from Cafe Latte, no spur of the moment therapist appointments, no more teaching at the one gig I resigned from--was just there today.  This move isn't academic any more; it's happening.

Done Effin deal

We got our house!!

Lashed to the tracks

Today, it seems that our lovely home-in-waiting has been seized and lashed to the railroad tracks, or to the stake. I've started sending messages to the land saying, "Rise up! Do something!" The scheming villain twirling his moustache seemingly in control of her fate has become even more confounding. I don't know how to rescue her.  Except by making supplication to the spirits and beings of the land.

But my petitions are too modern: "Don't be a victim! Rise up!"

If this were a movie, Bruce and I would ride down to Florida, stake out the villain's lair and confront him with glares, six-shooters and righteousness.

Here's what has us dazed

We're moving.  We don't know the details but we fell in love and are having a torrid affair with this house.

We've "proposed" but are still in negotiations. It's on a living, breathing little bayou which is the water you see.  The tide comes in and out from the Gulf of Mexico twice a day.  Our neighbors on one side are osprey, eagles, cranes and egrets and they live on a protected wildlife preserve.  Which also contains sacred Indian sites of some sort.

This piece of land is alive.

Think of how far you'll go, and how creative you can get, when you're having an affair with the love of your life. That's what it feels like we're doing.

Don't know yet if we'll get the house but it seems like it's been waiting for us.  We've gone through twists and turns and murkiness and intensity the last week trying to make a deal.  It feels like Florida property flippers, who own the house, are senselessly holding our home captive.  Demanding some kind of dowry-ritual on their terms and their terms only while meanwhile, one of the palm trees on our property needs watering.

Mercury's been retrograde the whole time and won't change direction til tomorrow night.  Really the last thing you should do with Mercury retrograde is sign a contract for a house.  Thousands of gallons of oil are shooting into the Gulf of Mexico daily.  Daily.  The astrologers think perhaps by the end of May something will have quieted that volcano.  Are we crazy?

It's time for us to move and change our lives.  Since we met this house eight days ago, all we've done is imagine ourselves in it. We planned to check out three potential states for our move: Florida, Arizona and Virginia.  We scheduled trips to Florida and Phoenix.  We saw our house/love the first day of the first trip to the first state, within two hours of beginning our research.  Yes, we've been part-time residents of Key West for the last five winters, Bruce went to college in Sarasota, his parents had a condominium in Bonita Beach decades ago.  But still, this could look impulsive.

We've been in a daze imagining ourselves and our cats and our lives in our new home. Dazed comes from dasen, from Old Norse dasa, perhaps originally meaning (says the online entymology dictionary) "to make weary with cold."  And of course we're beyond "weary with cold."  So we're dazed in more ways than one.