Move #33(ish)

what counts as a home?

No furniture, but the books are home!

Hello from the middle of move I haven’t talked much about, yet.

For now I’ll say that we’d been looking to leave our LA neighborhood for a couple of years. We had our eye on another area, closer to the kids’ school, and this perfect (for us) house popped up a couple of months ago. I walked through it for about five minutes and immediately FaceTimed my husband, who agreed that we had to grab it.

After buying this house, we found that it needed a new roof, and had patches of rotten sub-floor all over. The primary bathroom had to be gutted and redone, and will take at least another month while I deal with the ins and outs of the building department. But we can live in the rest of it, and it’s still a perfect house (for us). We’ve already met a handful of neighbors, been thrown on a bunch of text chains, and everyone has been so enthusiastic and welcoming.

I’ve been wondering why we are all so excited about this house specifically, and the main reason I can come up with is that it feels so friendly. It’s the kind of neighborhood where people make eye contact and smile, and stop to talk to each other, and lean on each other in nice ways. It’s the kind of house where I hope our friends and family can come hang for a while. Also, the previous owners went on vacation and then decided to stay there, which is exactly the kind of energy we love in a previous owner. They’re great on email, from Spain.

I’ve also been trying to calculate what number this move is. People who have moved a lot count the moves in various ways, and I’ve always done a casual add-up of all of the places I have ever received mail. I’ve lived in five countries, but moved a lot within them, and my seven years in college and law school were a blur of sublets and dorm rooms. The back of the envelope math for my memoir added up thirty-two mailing addresses, and that’s what PR and Marketing ran with. It became a tidy sound bite in interviews. “thirty-two moves!” people said, and I’d nod, like, yep. Tallying up and shrugging off that number is kinda my “thing.”

Now I’m rethinking my “thing,” because this house doesn’t feel like a house number thirty-three. It feels more emotionally engaging than that. We are not moving this delightful family we’ve lovingly, painstakingly assembled, into a house number thirty-three It’s a special move, with our special big kids, at a time when my husband and I are happily disentangling ourselves from the weeds of tiny-kid-rearing.

We have big ideas for the new place. A surprising emotional connection to it, despite not even having lived there yet. It makes me rethink which homes I’ve lived in should actually count.

In England there was the one London apartment where I remember welcoming my baby brother home. In Saudi, the house where we slept under the stairs in our gas masks during the Gulf War. In Kashmir, the house I was born into, and my Nanaji’s, and of course the one we built and lost. In Tuscany, there was the 17th century villa where I met many of my best friends. In Rome, an apartment shared with roommates straight out of Fellini. In twenty-three years in Los Angeles, there have been six houses. I have a close, complicated relationship with this city, but I have loved many homes here. The one I shared with my best friend, then the newlywed house, the one with the first baby, the one with the second baby. That makes the new house—the one with the not-so-babies—Home Number Fourteen.

We are barely furnished, but we’ve figured out how to work the TV, sharing the two chairs we currently have for living room furniture. And everyone is currently piled atop them (and me), cozy. My daughter is on a terrific tear, trolling her dad about his birthday, which is Sunday. “We’d better remember to get him a present,” she keeps saying, in front of him. Presents were procured last week, in an outing they planned, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy. “We don’t want him to think we forgot.”

More soon. x