Moving House

Moving House

My mother, who was born before 1937 and thus is no longer required to take off her shoes when she goes through airport security, is moving from the house that she and my dad moved into 21 years ago, to a house-like condominium near where my brother and his family reside. It’s a major move that involves putting her house up for sale, finding a new dwelling in a town 400 miles away, giving away and getting rid of several generations of stuff, packing up boxes and hiring a professional mover.

As she undertakes the multiple tasks of relocating, my emotions are all over the place.

It’s not that I’m attached to the house she’s vacating; I didn’t grow up in it.  But I do consider Nashville, Tennessee, where she’s moving from, to be my hometown. I was born in Memphis but don’t remember much about those early years of my life. Then we moved to Mobile, Alabama, for four years during which I started school. Then came Starkville, Mississippi, where my family endured three years before the great escape to “the Athens of the South.”

My family moved to Nashville forty years ago this summer so that come autumn my father could begin graduate school at Vanderbilt University. Neither of my parents had jobs to go to; we started out living on the ominous amount of $666 a month which my dad’s previous employer—the white Presbyterian church in Starkville that had ousted him over his support of civil rights for black people—was ordered by the presbytery to pay him for twelve months. My mother would eventually find gainful employment as a facilitator of the infant developmental program at The Kennedy Center of Peabody College. She helped babies who were developmentally delayed and worked with their families to stimulate their cognitive and physical growth, enabling some of these children to catch up to their peers.

It astonishes me now to think that during that summer of 1972, with both of my parents jobless, my family went on a big vacation trip out west. After we had unloaded all our worldly belongings into a rented house in Nashville, we loaded up our 1967 Volvo with a 10 x 10 feet tent, a kerosene stove and lantern, and six beer boxes which my mother had shellacked to make water-proof. Two boxes contained cooking utensils and food, and each of us had a box for our clothes and personal belongings. We drove from one national park or forest to another where we would spend days hiking, white-water rafting, horseback riding, reading, napping, and sitting around our campfire eating s’mores.

We had camping down to a science. We would pull into a campsite and—before other people towing a trailer could manage to back it into their site—my mom would unpack the trunk while I climbed onto the hood of the Volvo and opened the car-top carrier and lifted down to my dad and brother the rest of our equipment. Then as Mom geared up the stove and filled the collapsible water container, Dad and my brother and I would pitch the tent and blow up the air mattresses and arrange our sleeping quarters. As you entered the tent, my bed was always to the left of the door. At the foot of my bed and perpendicular to it was my brother’s bed. Next to him and in the opposite direction was my parents’ air mattresses and sleeping bags which zipped together. At the head of each bed was our respective beer box. My mother was usually the last person to change into her pajamas at night, after the lantern had been turned off, and we would sometimes shine a flashlight on her in the middle of disrobing. To scare away any wild animals, we would claim.

Now as my mother picks up stakes and prepares to live outside the South for the first time in her life—aside from the first year of their marriage when she and Dad lived in Edinburgh, Scotland—I find myself in awe of her courage to let go and move on. She’ll be saying good-bye to friends with whom she has shared many lifetimes. She’ll be saying good-bye to the metropolitan area that made great use of her talents as well as those of my father. And she’ll be saying good-bye to the Presbyterian congregation that four decades ago took us in and restored our faith in church. Second Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, is where I was confirmed as a member at the age of 13, where my mother transferred her church membership not once but twice, and where she was ordained an elder.

Nashville will always be my hometown, just like Louisville, Kentucky, will always be my mom’s hometown, even though neither one of us has relatives living there anymore. I look forward to visiting Mom in her new home in her new town and attending the church that takes her in. After she gets back from her next vacation.