The echoes also remain from memories and a life lived between those walls. When we leave a house these echoes are our own. An empty house reverberates with the past. When we said good-bye to our empty house we left behind the echoes of our daughter's newborn cries, the echo of her first word (dog) and the faintest little echo of her first steps, padding quietly and awkwardly across the wooden floor. We left behind the first "I love you's" shared between my husband and myself. We left behind the conversations of the expectations for our life together, the phone calls made to plan our wedding, the calls to my best friend that lasted well into the night. We left behind the much louder echoes of arguments and bickering and sad confusion that a marriage can contain when faced with a frustrating, unfixable past and seemingly uncertain future. We left the echoes of laughter that often filled those rooms, of silly inside jokes that really wouldn't be funny to anyone else but could leave us in stitches. The tiny voices of babies and, later, the sound of running feet and the warmth of comraderie and affection, the quenched need of in-commonness of a group of new mothers and their children from my special mommy group. Those echoes are some of my fondest because they contained everything I needed at the time.
We left behind the warm echoes of friendship and family around the dinner table for Thanksgiving and Easter and the ring of the doorbell on Halloween.
We lost our beloved cat, Franny, in that house. Her place to rest her beleaguered, tumor-filled body (a soft pillow on the corner of the couch) is now just a memory. Really, all of it becomes just that, a memory, even if you don't leave. But when you lose the physicalness of it, the actual placement of those memories, it feels like you're leaving it even farther behind. All of the spaces must be conjured up in your mind, or through pictures. The photos we took in that house have become more like relics from the past than ever before. They have become all the more precious, little time-capsules of a place we will never see again.
And you can't help but wish to be there again sometimes. The ache is often unbearable. But change, as they say, is inevitable. Life soldiers on and moves happen and the process begins anew.
We have been in France for over a month and a half. Most of this time has been spent in an empty house. The echoes of our footsteps have been our own but the others are not. I know a little bit about the people who were here before us. Ex-pats like ourselves but not from the States. Belgium, I think. I know it was a family with two little girls. I wonder what they left behind, what it meant for them to leave here, if they were happy to go or if circumstances beyond their control forced them to leave. They left their echoes here, regardless. I imagine it was pretty noisy here with two little ones running around. There are some traces of them; faint chalk marks on the stones beside the kitchen door, the remnants of a princess sticker on one of the windows. There isn't much else, since even the light fixtures where taken and the patches on the walls from pictures have been covered and painted over. They left it as we first saw it, an empty house with only their echoes in their wake.
As with many moves to other countries you have to make the choice to live in your own empty house for several weeks or live in your new empty house for that period, because it takes a long time for your furniture and the rest of your belongings to travel by cargo ship. We chose the latter because our daughter kept getting upset and crying whenever we, say, sold a television. We felt like we wanted to keep things as normal as we could for as long as possible while we were still in Los Angeles. We figured everything else at our next place would be new too, so it wouldn't be as weird for her and for us. In retrospect I'm not sure I would make the same choice. It may have been best to rip off the band-aid all at once and not parcel out the strangeness and the moving pains so much.
But because we made that choice, we lived here in an empty house for five weeks. For five long weeks we lived in the emptiness and with the echoes of someone else's past. For sure, there is a peacefulness that comes with a very minimal lifestyle. I came to enjoy the uncluttered, unfilled rooms, the ease of sweeping and cleaning an empty floor, the calmness and stillness that can eminate from empty rooms, despite who lived there before us. What was unsettling was it didn't feel like it was ours yet. When you leave the moorings of a house and the things in it you leave behind something of yourself. We all have an attachment to these things that, for right or wrong, we associate as extensions of ourselves, part and parcel of what defines us. So what was on that boat, moving ever closer to us, was a physical manifestation of our lives, our past lives to be sure, but part of who we still are and will remain. To know it's all coming, to realize you will soon be faced with unpacking things what once lived there and now must live here, to know you will open boxes that represent part of a life that no longer exists, in a different country, with a different language, a different soul...well, I realized it wasn't something I was looking forward to. The logistics have been hard. We had more places for things back then. We had created an order for this chaos, because so much of the things we have came with time. When it all comes at once and you must assimilate it all to a new environment, that's the tricky part. And you realize very quickly just how much utter crap you have. I mentioned before that I am a pack rat of sorts. I consider myself a bit of a reformed packrat because I've gotten a lot better at getting rid of stuff and not holding on to so much. I'm learning. But being confronted with so many THINGS all at once gives me pause and makes me want to get even better at separating my need to have so many things to define me. In other words, I can learn to let go.
Moving is nothing if it's not a lesson in letting go. Of our pasts, the former pattern of our lives, the safety of our old routine, familiar friendships, a beloved neighborhood we called our own and the network of support we fostered there. That the objects and artifacts once important to us now become a burden seems to be just another part of the courage it takes to move.
My familiarity with our empty house has given me a better appreciation for the stillness that comes with something so devoid of the things we often associate with who we are. The truth is those things do not define us. They do however sometimes anchor us to a past that, for better or worse, is ours. I'm glad to have a couch to sit on, to have the furniture I so lovingly selected for my daughters room, to have our old picture frames and special paintings we've collected through the years. I'm truly glad to have these things to hold onto and pass down to my daughter someday. But I realize now how much I need to get rid of as well. And there is nothing like a move that forces you to think about those things.
Our once empty house no longer echoes when we talk, our footsteps don't sound as loud. Our past has finally caught up with us and it came via a large cargo ship, traveling slowly through the Atlantic.
Now this house will be full of new noises, new memories will be made here, new milestones achieved, more tears and laughter will fill these once empty rooms. And when we leave here, and I know we will one day leave, we will take our things with us and the house will be empty once again. But this time, when we see the empty rooms, they will be filled with our memories, our echoes of the past. A new family will move here and find some traces of the life we left behind.
And then we'll go on to a new empty house, full of its own strange echoes, and start it all again.
