The In-between Time of Moving

by Anna

I'm not really here and I'm not really there either. It's this weird in between place where I feel disoriented and confused. A part of my self is being pulled to another world and another part of my self is fighting to remain here. It's like being in another dimension. I feel like I'm in two places at one time.

I don't like moving. I didn't move much when I was a child. There was a time when my family moved to Florida for one year, but other than that, I remained in the same house in the same neighborhood the whole time I was growing up. Things were not always good, but they were always familiar. Now, everything is changing.

The year was 1981 when I made the most daring move of my lifetime. I was living in Colorado at the time. It was spring and the leaves were just coming out on the oaks and maples beside our home. My children were six and four years old at the time. I remember watching them like a hawk as they were playing outside. A couple of city street gang kids had been sighted in our neighborhood and I was extremely alert to anything out of the ordinary. The town I lived in in Colorado was right next to the small town where I had grown up. I hadn't gone very far.

My brother Bobby lived up North. I never really knew why he moved there. It could be because my father always talked about the North when we were little. My father talked about one day going up North and fishing salmon the same way some people talk about finally reaching the gates of heaven at the end of a very hard and troubled life. I used to imagine this old man with a fishing rod stumbling up a long flight of stairs with a mysterious mist surrounding him. At the top of the stairs he opens a door that leads to a long tunnel with a light at the end. At the end of the light he stops and drops to his knees and praises the Lord as he sees this brightly illuminated salmon swimming towards him in all its wondrous glory. Finally, he has made it. He has found his way to the great salmon in the sky.

My brother Bobby was always talking about how safe it was where he lived. He said that the teenagers acted like Mayberry RFD there. He said that it was the most beautiful place in God's green world. I sometimes wonder if it was my brother's stories or my father's dreams that finally prompted me to follow that winding road North.

About a week before we packed up and moved, I started to feel this in between feeling. Colorado was all I had known for most of my life. Colorado knew me. It knew the familiar echoes of my childhood and I knew it. I knew every corner, every turn of the road I grew up on. I knew both its shadows and the places of light that I had turned to when the storms of my childhood had forced me to look elsewhere for comfort. It held me in the woods at the bottom of the hill on I lived on where the creek wound through the oaks and maples that I had called family. I was leaving both the pain and the beauty of a place that held both my nightmares and the tenderness of my childhood heart. I was leaving, and I was never moving back. I was crying inside with no tears on the outside. I would learn to cry later.

The move up North took ten days. We drove with my two sons in the back seat. They slept almost the whole way. Children have no say in these things. My youngest son who was four years old at the time had a stuffed moose that he clung to for comfort during the move. I can still see him sleeping in the back seat with his brown moose held tight against his chest, his little chin resting on the moose's head like a pillow. That moose was so important to him. Once, after leaving one of the hotels we stayed in, my son started softly crying. I looked around to see what was wrong. There he was, hugging an old sweatshirt of mine. I looked around for his moose, but I couldn't find it. We stopped the car when we realized that the moose had been forgotten. It was two hours behind us in the last hotel we had stayed in. We turned the car around and drove two hours back to rescue the moose from almost certain death in a hotel dumpster. When my son and the moose were reunited, and it was once again safely loved and held securely in his arms, we found our way back Northward.

My oldest son who was six years old at the time spent most of the trip trying to read the map and telling us what the best route to take was. I was amazed at how good he was at this for his age. My own sense of direction leaves much to be desired. I was glad that he did not inherit that from me. When I looked into his eyes though, I could see his apprehension. It was not easy being six years old and moving from a place he'd known all his life.

When we reached the Alcan it was raining. Back then the Alcan was not paved yet and there were deep holes and places where the road just kind of disappeared. I remember seeing two men on motorcycles trying to make the trip. I asked them how they were driving motorcycles on the Alcan and they said that they were thinking about turning back. I didn't know it at the time, but spring might not be the best time to brave this kind of move. It's called break up when the snow and ice start melting and everything is just slush. Once, when we stopped by a lake we kept hearing this sound that sounded alarmingly like rifle fire. When we asked someone what it was, they said that it was the ice breaking up. They said that if we were ever out on the ice on a lake and heard something like that, we should get off of the lake immediately. People have fallen through the ice and drowned during break up.

The world on either side of the Alcan was the most beautiful stretch of God's creation that I had ever seen before. There were snow capped mountains and crystal clear lakes. I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz when she said, "Todo, we're not in Kansas anymore". I had always seen photos of the North and thought that the pictures had been touched up. After really seeing it though, I realized how beautiful it was. It was like another world. I probably could have enjoyed it more if I had been healed from my difficult childhood, but I wore my childhood like an old family quilt everywhere I went. The long move had not separated me from my memories or my pain. Unresolved memories are like a gray cloak that you can faintly see through. It puts a film on everything. In 1981, the film was thick and unrelenting. I could see the beauty, but only through the filter of my father's dreams, the longing of my brother's escape, and my own unrealistic hopes that moving would take away the childhood pain that I carried deep within me.

I lived in the North from 1981 to 1996. I found that the North, just like everywhere else, has its good and its bad, its safe and unsafe places. I have both sad and sentimental memories of living there, but that's another story.

Just a couple of years ago my present husband and I were helping my youngest son move. In his closet were old star wars figures covered with dust, some posters of female stars in bikinis that I remember being on his walls when he was a teenager, car models that he had as a child, boxes and boxes of old memories, and then, there it was in the corner, pushed up against the wall...the little brown moose. I picked it up and felt it warm against my heart. I closed my eyes and spent a few moments just remembering. When I opened my eyes my son was looking at me. He said, "I never could bring myself to throw that away." I was so glad that he didn't. I handed the moose to him and he put it gently in a box to take with him. Some things just stay close to your heart no matter how long ago it was.

Now I am facing moving again. I am not moving as far, but I still have that old feeling of being between two worlds. Our living room is full of empty boxes waiting to be filled. I'm going through everything to see what to keep and what to throw away. I'm saying goodbye to the neighbors who want to take us out to dinner before we leave. I'm feeling the atmosphere of the area I've lived in for the last seven years and allowing myself to take it in fully before I leave it behind, and this time I'm crying on the outside too.