So many cliches come to mind “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it” , “when it rains it pours”, “it’s all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out”… ok, maybe not that last one, but really, I feel like there must be some old adage that captures me and all my crazy over the past few days.
The good news – we are being overrun with good news. The great news – the maven, while trying to find something helpful to say to the sobbing mess that was me for most of yesterday, actually referred to the influence of karma and the bigger picture. That really made me happy and it may have gotten me through the worst of my tidal wave of sadness (at least yesterday).
Sadness, you ask? What happened? Didn’t you just close on the house you are so excited about in the town you’ve been dreaming of for years… isn’t this exactly what you wanted. What’s your problem? All good questions! In a word, reality, that’s what happened.
As I may have mentioned, as we were driving up the Northway (have confirmed the nomenclature with the locals at our closing), we received an offer on Henry Street. It was, without a doubt, absolutely perfect timing – if we could’ve written the script, we would have walked in to our close on Madison Street with a offer in hand. And that’s exactly what we did. Grateful, fortunate, lucky us! Crazy in fact!
So, we walked out of our very happy, successful and delightfully uneventful closing process with keys in hand to our new home, our new life, and within 30 minutes we were on the phone with our agent in Alexandria talking through their offer and working on our counter. Nothing to complain about, but so totally not what I thought we’d be doing to celebrate the first minutes/hours of our new status as homeowners in the Empire State. And you know, I like things in a certain order… and this was not that order. So, we got that launched, and then celebrated with a drink a the bar at Chianti’s (we’d never been in the “new” location) and dinner at Henry Street Taproom (a fave – that scotch egg, it’s winner). As a sidenote, which only added to our sense of “this is a good thing”, we love the fact that we popped in no less than 4 totally packed bars (Max London’s, Wheatfields, Boca, Druther’s ) before landing in our happy spot at Chianti’s . This at 5:30 on a friday – the people in this town, they get Happy Hour, the seem to take it seriously. We think it’s awesome – especially in the middle of Feb!
Anyhoo, I was happy on Friday – although pretty much exhausted, and much to the maven’s dismay, not visibly excited about the whole offer situation. Numb was probably the right word, and it went downhill from there. We got their counter to our counter, and I realized that was pretty much it – we were about to go under contract, and this whole happy dance of a magical move to Saratoga was about to turn into a much dreaded, postponed and in-denial process of saying goodbye to a home I love, a neighborhood I love, and a departure from a place where I’ve been very, very happy for 25 years. I think I’ve been doing a darn good job putting all that sadness in a sack, and accepting this offer launched the start of the tidal wave. While it was easy to use the details of the negotiation as the excuse for my total lack of joy about achieving the one, critically important piece of this puzzle, but I think the two key drivers are: I fundamentally love my house so much that I don’t think it’s being sold for what it’s worth (insert another cliche here) and much more fundamentally, this contract means my life in Alexandria is now to be measured in weeks and days. My acute sadness is the simply measure of how very, very happy I’ve been in our home and in our life in Old Town and in the DC area for all these years.
The poor Maven is miserable – he doesn’t know what to do with me. He keeps looking at my hopefully like “are you over it yet?” I’m trying to just get him prepared for a lot of tears… I’ve honestly shed very few so far (by my standards & with a few notable breakdowns along the way), but I think that as exciting as this adventure will be – we’ve now entered the dark phase, and I think I just have to be a little miserable to mourn all that I’m leaving behind. Of course I’ll come back, and I will not lose my friends, but there’s simply an end of an era that I’m going to have to process and grieve. It won’t be pretty and I know it makes me look like an ingrate, but I don’t think skipping this part is an option. I’m going to do my best to do it with grace and minimal number of moments I regret.
While it’s usually one door closes and another opens, for us, we’ll first be closing one beloved door before we open the next – which awaits us at The Spa.
