The Move.

We've been packing for a month, and tomorrow is the day we get the truck in gear and fill it with the bedrooms, the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, the studio, the art on the walls, the clothes off our backs, the books from the shelves. The light of the only home that my kids remember has been incrementally shuttered with each scrrrriiiiick of tape along the seam, and while I think little Libbie's adjustment might only last for a couple of confused mid-night awakenings, it's Jackson that makes this difficult to comprehend. I've moved too many times, Jess has as well, and Lib will take it all in stride as long as the faces remain the same. But Jack can maneuver this home terrain silently in the wee dark hours; the optimal trajectory for leaping from the window seat to the couch is muscle memory now; there may not be a cabinet that fits him so snugly as the one in which our scree pile of tupperware resides for only a few hours more.
"Daddy, I want to show you! Daddy I want to show you where I'm hiding!"

A home is defined by who lives within, but how can you feel that knowledge until you've moved from one beloved home to a new one? All I can do for my family, and especially the boy who may not grasp the concept, is express the joy and the hope that I feel at the prospect of a new home: a larger living room, where our books can line the walls, a smaller but brighter studio, a kitchen with a stove and oven blessedly out of little Lib's reach, a backyard for the kids (going out to play will no longer mean a trip down fifty steep stairs, a car ride, and planning for the inevitable desperation of the potty dance.).

Tomorrow we will settle in for our first night, we will lie with Jackson and Libbie until they give up and breathe deep the dark, and we will retire to our room of boxes and lamps and a giant bag of mixed shoes, and in the morning I will make pancakes in the light of a new home, a light that we brought with us and didn't have to unpack, and then we will all go to the playground, and I will bring my basketball.