For a little over six months, my spouse of 30 years and I have been living in liminal space. In March, we decided to sell our home and find another place to put down new roots, and this week our loft sold without our knowing what’s next. We’ve sometimes had 2 addresses, stayed in a lot of AirBnBs, have lost property contract bids, and had most of our belongings packed away at various stages and in various places throughout this time.
We have several options. We always do. In these 3 decades together, we’ve lived in 5 states and nearly 20 different places -homes, apartments, former hotels and factories. We could take our proceeds and return to either of our hometowns and buy half a house with cash, finance the rest.
But Chicago and Urbana don’t hold the same allure they once did, and Memphis is a place I need to visit more often but is not an option for many other reasons. And we love Denver. We really do.
Of all our moves and shifts, Denver is the only place to which we have moved twice.
A dear mentor has offered his about-to-be empty condo as an emergency backup home. His move from Denver to Seattle isn’t quite complete, and he and his clergy spouse will be holding onto the condo. This is an incredibly generous offer, and keeps us from being under the kind of pressures we could be feeling.
But we aren’t going to be able to stay within the limits of the City and County of Denver itself in all likelihood. We aren’t even going to be able to move to one of the most fascinating and truly diverse communities in the country, Aurora. This is a dense region of over 40 municipalities, Denver is only the largest. And it may no longer fit our needs.
We’re older than we were last time we did this, in many ways beyond the passing of 7 years.
And we have changed a great deal.
On this side of it, all of our parents are dead. My father died when we were in our 20s, but in the years since we last thought about where and how we would live, both of my in-laws and my own mother have died.
I have learned to plant and grow. I began container gardening 10 years ago and had great balcony spaces for it. But it was while living inside a loft home with no access to the outdoors at all that I learned to grow from seed, and I started a small hydroponics garden. But now it’s time to move outside for real. Plant food to truly feed, not only ourselves but others.
Covid shifted our understandings of how we use space together, and how we would prefer to use space together. Our loft was gorgeous and spacious but its one-room nature became untenable under quarantine. We managed, but we don’t need to choose to live like that. It’s okay to need doors. For sure, there is a lot about boundaries in general in this.
The world is teetering on several climate precipices, and being car dependent in an urban region is irresponsible. Unfortunately, entire Denver neighborhood quadrants have been left out of the light rail network, and had to be excluded from the outset on this house hunt.
Also, I am not sure the elderly should be allowed driving privileges without further testing past certain ages. We are only in our 50s now, but we do plan to age in place. No transit access is a hard line for us.
We have learned these things about ourselves in this time, and are working to make the new world we need for our own lives possible.
Everything else is in flux, fluid.
In this time of great change both in my own personal life -in all our lives- and in the world around us, finding the things that ground us and give us hope is crucial.
I am still feeling unmoored. Nothing in my life is the same as it was a year ago at this time, and the changes make my head spin. Friends have died and friendships have ended. Work relationships have crumbled. Much is left shattered.
But something new can be built from what is left. Like a mosaic in which pictures emerge from shards of color, the patterns will be organic and the lines not quite clean.
And that is as it should be.