Grimy and exhausted, Danny and I sat down at our friend’s kitchen table.
For 2 days, we had been shifting everything we owned from the house we rented on Vashon Island to West Seattle.
We are both in our 50s. We’re too old to do all this work ourselves. Plus, I still have a mild case of long COVID. Thanks to the generosity of a friend, we had the money to hire a team of Latino men who live on the island and do jobs for people who need help. Watching them pack our furniture and boxes into the box truck we rented and the van our friends loaned us? Astonishing. They packed what we owned like they were playing Jenga, quickly and deftly.
We’re so grateful for them. The daughter of one of these men is in Dan’s preschool class. When he realized that he was helping Teacher Dan, he wanted to do an even better job. We had a long talk at the end of the work about his time on the island, about his daughter, and about how he has worked to earn a good living being of service to others.
Of course I gave him a big tip.
I don’t think we ever do a good-enough job in this culture of acknowledging how deeply indebted we are to immigrant Latino men and women who do the work that needs to be done. Our country would fall apart with them here.
When they drove away, most of our belongings were in the truck and van.
Most.
All through the day, I was playing a game of Jenga in my mind. “If we finish all this by 1, then we can take the ferry, unload on the other side, and then take the 5 pm ferry back to load up again.”
As the hours grew longer, my final declaration: Okay, it’s 5 pm. Let’s get to the ferry now. We will unload on the other side, then drive back here to sleep in this house one more time.
The kids helped us unload all the boxes and furniture into the garage we have here. Everyone wanted to stop. We couldn’t stop. When the truck and van were empty, we stared at each other for a moment.
And then we locked the garage door and headed back to the ferry, weary and beyond thinking.
Look, unless you have a gajillion dollars, or the company you work for is paying to move you, moving is hell. I read an email from a marketer that arrived in my inbox the other day. She talked about how she has decided that her peace of mind is worth everything to her. That’s why she paid people to box up her house, another set of people to move them, and a professional stager to unpack all her boxes and set up the house to her specifications.
Delete.
I cannot relate to that. Can you?
To each her own, of course. Good for her.
But for most of us, moving is a marathon without power bars or water breaks. I’m still trying to catch up on sleep almost 3 weeks later.
That’s why we felt such gratitude to our friend who fed us on Saturday evening, after we had woken up, put the rest of our stuff from our old house into the moving truck and van, and then headed off the island for the last time as islanders.
Everyone was done. Spent.
We had ceased to be Vashonites
God, we were tired.
Once again, food restored us. Our friend had baked gluten-free dairy-free pizza for us. We gratefully gulped down cold water.
And then, she offered us a deep-green salad.
I took a bite and felt tears come to my eyes. (Is this the first time I’ve cried about a salad? Maybe.)
Instantly, the crunch and flavor zoomed me back to a PCC Community Co-op store in 2005. Newly diagnosed with celiac, I went for a shopping trip at this gorgeous grocery store filled with abundance. Confused, I wandered the aisles, trying to figure out if a packaged food or deli item was gluten-free. No one outside that store understood about the need for gluten-free food for health. But several employees got it. They knew. They led me up and down aisles, pointing out everything I could eat. I left so grateful.
I shopped there for years after, until we moved to Vashon in 2009. I bought all my first gluten-free flours there. The first 4 years of my blog, I bought the ingredients for our recipes at PCC. The salad our friend fed us? Their Emerald City salad, filled with kale and peppers, chard and fennel, with a tangy lemon dressing? I often bought a quart for dinner when I lived by myself, and then as a side when Danny and I sat at our round dining table together in our apartment in Queen Anne.
That’s why I cried a little.
We lived on Vashon Island, this gorgeous rural place, with tunnels of trees and beaches worth the drive from our home. We have many friends there. But after COVID, it changed. We changed too. A huge wave of wealthy people moved in to buy houses during lockdown and now they let the houses sit empty all year long, except 3 weekends a year.
Everyone’s property taxes went skyrocketing. We couldn’t afford to live there anymore.
A month before we moved, we began saying YES to leaving and to starting new in Seattle again. That first mouthful of salad was a Proustian moment for me, an immediate sensory experience that started a torrent of good memories.
And as I chewed, here’s what rose up in my body.
We’re home.
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