For months, moving to Arizona has been this thing that was coming.
Eventually.
There were houses to look at and offers to make. A Michigan house to prepare and list and show and wait – oh, the waiting – for someone else to love. There were moving estimates and relocation conversations and endless lists. Things to sell. Things to donate. Things to pack. Dogs to train. Goats to rehome. Furniture to obsess over.
So. Much. Furniture. 😂
For months, Arizona lived somewhere out there in the future.
And then Monday, I closed on my new house.
My house.
In Arizona.
I walked through the front door with keys that belonged to me and spent my first week bouncing between my new home and my new office, beginning to get the tiniest glimpse of what this life is actually going to look like.
And today, the Michigan house officially sold.
Just like that.
The house that held so much of our life belongs to someone else now.
And somehow, in the span of four days, I closed on one life and closed out another.
That sentence feels much bigger when I read it back.
Tomorrow morning, I fly home to Michigan.
Tomorrow night is a work farewell get-together. Saturday is a biennial trip to Bronner’s. Sunday will be filled with visitors and goodbyes and people coming and going while we finish wrapping up the last few things at the house.
And then Monday morning, the movers come.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday they will pack our life into boxes and load it onto a truck.
And if everything goes according to plan, Wednesday evening we will load three dogs, two cats, two humans and what I can only assume will be an absolutely unreasonable amount of road-trip snacks into an SUV and point it west.
Toward home.
Those words feel so strange – west, toward home.
It is happening so fast now.
That might be the strangest part.
For so long, this move felt impossibly far away. I measured it in months. Then weeks. I kept thinking, I have time.
And suddenly, I don’t.
Suddenly there are last dinners and last visits and last drives down roads I’ve driven a thousand times without ever thinking they would someday be the last.
Suddenly I’ll be looking around a house that was ours and realizing that in a few days, I will close the door behind me and not come back.
There is grief in that.
Of course there is.
This wasn’t how I imagined leaving Michigan.
There should have been two of us making this decision. Two of us arguing about what to keep. Marc should have been beside me complaining about how much stuff I own while simultaneously insisting we absolutely could not get rid of some ridiculous thing he’d had tucked away for twenty years.
I know that.
I will always know that.
But there is something else here, too.
There is excitement.
Real, honest-to-God excitement.
I love my new house.
I love walking through it and imagining the people who will fill those rooms. My kids. My family. My friends. Dogs sprawled everywhere. Holidays. Dinner parties. Visitors staying too long. Laughter coming from upstairs.
I can see a life there.
And after a year in which I wasn’t always sure what the next version of my life was supposed to look like, being able to see one feels pretty extraordinary.
I don’t think moving forward means you stop looking backward.
I think sometimes you stand right in the middle.
One hand holding everything that came before.
The other reaching toward whatever comes next.
And maybe for a little while, that’s exactly where you’re supposed to be.
So tomorrow, I fly back to Michigan.
I’ll hug people. I’ll say goodbye. I’ll probably cry. I’ll definitely laugh. I’ll make one more trip to Bronner’s. I’ll watch my entire house disappear into cardboard boxes.
And then Wednesday evening, if all goes according to plan, we’ll pull out of that driveway.
Three dogs.
Two cats.
Greg and me.
A whole lot of memories.
And one very full SUV headed west.
For months, I’ve been saying I’m moving to Arizona.
Next week, I will say:
I’m going home.
And for the first time in a very long time, home won’t mean Michigan.
