Moving Right Along
Setting up in a new space requires a lot of patience
As someone who thinks about spaces quite a bit, moving is an overwhelming experience. As I mentioned in this post, I’ve moved from Colorado to Cape Cod in Massachusetts. For the first 80 days I was living with my parents, which was … interesting. But we closed on our new home in Mashpee on Tuesday, and brought the last of our stuff in on Thursday. We’re currently living out of boxes, and slowly getting to know the house, the neighborhood, and the area.
Mashpee is Wampanoag land, and we’ve been reading up on the history of the region and relied heavily on the Mashpee Wampanoag Museum for reading suggestions. We also attended the 105th Annual Mashpee Wampanoag Powwow, which was an amazing event. I’ll hopefully have more on Wampanoag culture and history in future entries; but it was important to us both to understand the implications of living where we are living.
Settling into a new house in a new place is a constant process of adjustment and calibration. The spaces themselves tend to dictate — or at least heavily influence — the routines we create within them. When we try to superimpose the way we used to do things in our old spaces onto the new ones, it generally doesn’t work. The learning curve can be massive.
Apparently I’ve inherited both an irrigation system and an outdoor hot tub. As far as I can tell, the irrigation system half-works? The hot-tub and the entire maintenance lifestyle that seems to accompany it is something I’m going to deal with another day. Taking moments of gratitude and joy are the best ways to pace ourselves.
All that being said, the new place is absolutely wonderful. As things find their places, it’s as if they were always there, which is always a good sign. And our backyard is not only huge, but fully fenced-in with ample shade. When we tell people that we actually bought the house for our dog, we’re only half-joking. My parents’ house had a small yard, but it wasn’t fenced in. So our dog didn’t have the free-range yard she was used to in Colorado. Thankfully, she’s bounced back and has been exploring every corner.
As we continue to settle into the new space, I’ll have a lot more to say about this new chapter. But it will be a few weeks until I’ll be into the regular routine of writing again. There’s only so much bandwidth one has while unpacking hundreds of boxes and discovering all the nuances of the new house, and I’m trying to proceed slowly, steadily, and mindfully with it all.
Thanks for your patience over the next few weeks!
Anthony