out of the frying pan, into the furnace

Yesterday I made salsa, and pickles, and biscuits using some famous Southern flour, and then last night our friends Mike and Chad arrived and we sat around the huge table in our ridiculously large and paneled kitchen. We drank beer and ate lamb and chickpeas, and when they left to drive to Savannah, I leaned for a moment in the doorway, happy to have broken in the new place.

We live here now.

Some of you know the saga of the pee house, and the decidedly unfunny turn of events in the last two weeks that led to the saga of the pee-and-flea house, and the week/end that involved many phone calls and several of the standup males in my life frantically Craigslisting new places, bringing me beer, and contacting the Better Business Bureau, respectively. I took down the post about the pee house for a while, in fact, because there was a chance that we would have to sue the rental company to get out of the lease. (Famous last words: I think we can handle a little pee. BUT CAN YOU HANDLE FLEAS, YOU COCKY MORON? NO. NO YOU CANNOT.)

But then things ... worked out. Monday I flew back to Michigan; Tuesday, we packed up the last of our stuff. On Wednesday of last week, as Liz and I cleaned out the Grand Rapids apartment, my father called and said he'd gotten through to the supervisor of the company and we were off the hook as to the lease, and then I cried with relief while Liz swept out my soon-to-be former closet.

Everyone should have a Liz. Also a B, and a Cliff, and a brother who takes you to Savannah an hour after you have walked through a thoroughly uninhabitable property that you have already agreed to rent only to discover that it is, in fact, wrecked, and then buys you beer in a delightful coastal city with no open container law. Also a Chad, and all your other friends who respond to a series of despondent texts with There must be a way out, we'll find it and Dude, hang in there. We will sweep you away to a fancy hotel when we come visit; hell, treat yourself to one now.

Where was I? Oh yes, the move. Which was suddenly much more manageable upon learning that, okay, we didn't quite have a place to live, but that we would not have to live in the pee-flea house.

So the B and I turned in our keys and drove our loaded truck to a hotel for the night. We didn't get a chance to say a proper goodbye to Michigan--instead, we collapsed into bed. The next morning, we drove south with everything in the back of the slightly-too-small U-Haul and hoped that we would be able to find a place over the weekend, once we were officially in Georgia. We wound our way down through the hills and mountains of I-77, our things rattling in the truck. But again, things worked out. A Craigslist contact came through while we were somewhere in West Virginia, and we arrived in town on Friday evening, took a walk through her house, and said, Yes. We will take it. 

The next morning, we moved our things in as our new landlords painted and installed ceiling fans, and then we went to the movies, because it was one hundred degrees outside and we needed to kill three hours. Then we spent a few days unpacking and hanging up curtains and acclimating to this Southern summer life where you stay inside all day because the heat index is 108 and you draw the blinds against the sun.

It is a nice enough house--very Southeastern, one story and brick, three bedrooms and more closets than we know what to do with. It reminds me of a cleaner and tidier version of the house we all lived in during grad school. And it is nice to not have people living upstairs or to the side of us, and as such we have gotten very good at yelling from room to room. Also, we have to buy our own washer and dryer and put it in the garage-turned-sunroom workshop, a room that I have taken to calling The Murder Room, since clearly no one would turn a perfectly fine garage into a glass-sliding-door room with a drain and a sink unless they intended on murdering college coeds in their former garage. But the couple who rents it out are very nice, and there is a back patio shaded by some tall pines, and our neighbors are actually from Hamburg, New York. And yesterday I went to the farmers market and bought herb plants from a woman named Pinki who moved here from Detroit. The day before, we were at the laundromat with two women from Minnesota. For a place that's pretty much a Southern college town, we sure are running into a lot of ex-pats.

Tomorrow there is HR paperwork, and parking passes and figuring out the faculty gym membership requirements, and then this week I will finally sit down and begin to plan the classes I am teaching in three weeks. This summer has been a strangely luxurious stretch of time, one not filled with work but the curious semi-work of writing and finding housing and moving, and it will be nice to sit at my desk in my new office with my old laptop and start wrangling course calendars. And when that gets too tiring, or when I start to feel sad and lonely, I will take the dog for a walk a few blocks down our road, and stop in front of the pee house with its FOR RENT sign, and stand a safe distance from its flea-infested carport and think, Dear Brain. You can just go ahead and shut the fuck up any time now.