Our dear neighbors and friends moved away yesterday. Late last week the moving truck spent a couple of days in front of their house; yesterday afternoon Laura finished the cleaning; last night they drove away with a van full of odds, ends, and a box of cleaning supplies.
We’re accustomed to their departure in late May. Every May they return to Italy where Nic leads students on archaeological digs and teaches at an academy in Rome. And every August they are back: Guiliana and Carlo arrive on our doorstep and Emma Grace, overjoyed, goes out to play with them.
But this August they won’t be back. Their home is in Ann Arbor now, where Nic and Laura both will teach at the University of Michigan.
Yesterday Laura took leave of that house, the house they moved into when Giulianna was five months old; the house where, two years later, Carlo came home from the hospital newborn; the house we’ve stayed in visiting until far too late or to which they’ve returned from our home, stomachs stretched from another Thanksgiving dinner.
It might mean nothing to leave a house, to close the door for the last time on the walls that held you. It is, after all, the same sun that shines on your new house. It is the same sun that fell through the rooms of your old house in that familiar way and picked out the motes of dust that held your baby spellbound, reaching, amazed. It is the same sun whose amber afternoon light lay across the back of the blue sofa and then made the wood floor glow in that pattern there. It is the same sun that shone through the light of these trees and dappled the entire driveway where the children were playing and splashing in the baby pool that you filled from the hose near the house, or where they stood and waved to the cars as they passed, or where they first launched themselves, tenative and thrilled, on their first bicycles with training wheels.
It might mean nothing to leave a house. What is geography, after all?
