We moved into this house in 2015, when it was empty and glowing and we couldn’t figure out how to fit in a decent-sized couch. (In fact we never figured this out, and have had two small love seats for the past ten years.)

I was devastated to leave our old apartment, back then, a thick-walled adobe with a gorgeous shared courtyard, but we wanted to buy a place of our own and Paul loved this house and the huge backyard. He was always very comfortable here.

It takes me time to get used to anything new. A new idea. A new space. Over the years we made this house into something beautiful and very much our own, renovating the garage/workshop into my studio, switching a faulty set of French doors for a nice sliding glass door with a screen (mosquito haters will understand), adding art, updating the bathroom in a much-documented month of tile shopping and reno work that happened while I was very pregnant.

Now we are leaving this house, this home, my home, our home. And predictably, I am not ready.

We came to Tucson, as I’ve said, even before we arrived at this address. I never would have imagined moving to Arizona before it happened, but I’ve grown up into my adulthood here. We had a baby here. We lost our dog here, when he ascended to his Dog in Space self. I’ve written books and published books and had surgery and made meals. Every Sunday morning since 2013 we’ve gone to breakfast with our SIL/BIL, which we call Breakfast Club, and which expanded to include the baby after he was born. (Ryan recently reminded us that the initial form, or perhaps even the goal, of Breakfast Club was to eat breakfast pie, though sadly our preferred venue for such pie—the B Line—closed during the pandemic.)

There is a certain institutional knowledge that comes with living in place for a very long time. (“Very” being relative here, but it’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I was a teenager.) I know the time of year when the desert flowers will make the air smell like ground-up Smarties. I know what it means when the sky looks this way or that way, how a monsoon can come upon you from almost nowhere and turn the light purple and green. I know where to have a nice dinner out on Christmas because they have mulled wine (The Coronet) and where the waitresses will shake alegría on your food from a little glass shaker full of colorful pompoms, which always makes me laugh (Buendia). I know where to ride a horse and where to book a hotel room in the summer for the use of a pool or a lazy river.

I know where to go to get what I need. I have a routine. I have a life, basically.

But now we’re leaving.

I can tell you why, and I have been telling people why for a few weeks now, ever since we closed on our new house in Berkeley. (More on that later.) After Harvey was born, certain things that had been natural rhythms of life in Tucson started to feel much more difficult, like the summer heat that now stretches reliably from April until mid-November, and the fact that Dave had to travel at least a few times a year for work. The schools aren’t great. The ocean has always been far away, but since it has barely rained at all the past year or so, it felt much farther. This winter/spring we took a couple of trips to see if we might want to move somewhere on the west coast, and we decided that we did.

When we settled on Berkeley, we went on a couple more trips to scout neighborhoods and meet with a realtor. We visited houses, first with Harvey, who reliably walked through every door and asked, “Any toys around here?” When he realized that any present toys were unlikely to be cars, he pivoted swiftly to climbing vertiginous staircases. The next time, I went out to look alone.

The trip that actually won us our house was shockingly recent: a few weeks ago we drove up to Utah to visit Dave’s mom, and after two days of driving I flew to California and blitzed through about six more houses, before putting an offer on one. We won out over some all-cash buyers with a note explaining how much we loved the home and the neighborhood (never let anyone tell you a liberal arts education is worthless) and I signed some paperwork on the flight home. Escrow was only two weeks, because in the Bay Area, people do their inspections in advance. Everything started happening very quickly.

And yet not quickly? We were still in Utah. We were talking to daycares and booking movers while still technically on vacation. Finally home, we’ve had two weeks to get the affairs of this whole period of our life in order, and we will soon be gone. Our local realtor will clean and stage our beautiful house, which she helped us buy not so very long (or yes, so very very long) ago.

This is all very rushed. There has been precious little time to say our goodbyes and do our final chores, let alone absorb the reality of our leaving. We will be living near Harvey’s closest-in-age cousin (plus of course her parents, Dave’s younger brother and his wife), a number of good friends and their kids, a fifteen minute bike ride from the beach. But we will be leaving Ryan and Kim, who have been a steady presence in Harvey’s life since he was a day old, barely hours in this world. Leaving our friends, and the hawks that cry to us from the tree in the yard, and the coyotes and the javelina who slink and troop through the neighborhood, stealing, respectively any chickens or jack-o-lanterns that people see fit to leave outside. (Living chickens, I mean. If anyone is leaving raw chicken meat outside in a Tucson August, I don’t want to know about it.)

I am struggling to remind myself that things in our new house, our new life—which we chose! Which we want!—will not be worse, they will just be different. This will feel so much more real to me once we’re there, walking distance to a park with a creek running through it. This period of the moving process has felt to me like the first trimester of pregnancy, when you’re fully aware that you’ve blown up your own life, and you can only access the benefits of doing so with your intellect, not your emotions.

This has been a hard year in many ways, and I am a slick, skinned, raw little beast, about to drive many hours with a toddler from one empty house to another. I need to buy a new desk in Berkeley. I need to buy, at last, a full-sized couch. My friend Molly Backes refers to these painful periods of your life as “chrysalis years,” when you wrap your caterpillar body up in a cocoon and literally liquefy it while becoming something new. Like all magic, it hurts. It hurts.

I am going to miss our beautiful house. I know where everything goes here. I know the quality of light, and where houseplants will and will not grow. I know where Harvey has eaten breakfast pretty much every (non-Sunday) morning of his life, and where he sleeps. I know that the bathroom is a beautiful blue-green grotto, perhaps the most peaceful room in the world. The skylight there lets the moon glow through, sending squares of soft light onto the walls, into the sink, across the floor. When I sit in the backyard, people often stop in the middle of our phone calls and remark on the fact that they can hear birds calling. “Is that real?” they ask. “Is that a recording?”

It has been between 100 and 116 degrees all week, and that really should make me ready to leave, because it is so aggressive, so enervating; we take Harvey outside for a few minutes and my heart starts beating strangely, like it’s going into heat shock. I have a horseback riding lesson in the morning and I’m destroyed for the rest of the day.

But who am I, I find myself asking, to live an easy life? I don’t just mean that because the world is falling down, because people are dying, although it is and they are and there is no good reason I can point to why it’s them and not me. But no, what I mean is that I am used to this, it is what I muscle through, and when it’s gone I know I’ll try to push against it and stumble when I find nothing there. I’ll have to push against something new.

I hope Paul’s spirit comes with me. I hope our new house is beautiful and opens up to us with love. I hope this house stands a hundred more years full of beauty and care, and that I someday get to walk back through it, if only in the halls of my mind. I love my house. I love my life. And now it is time to love the future.