“Remoted” – Day 373 (Wednesday)

In this life that is one big, fabulous series of events, today is yet another anniversary. On this date in 2001, married almost four months and back in the states for about one month, the then-new husband and I moved to Tennessee. He owned a house in Clarksville, but the property management company handling his house while he was stationed out of the area told us the person who was renting wouldn’t leave for six more months.  This meant we needed a short-term rental. 

Once upon a time two decades ago...

Because it had taken many weeks to find and rent any place I had ever lived in Massachusetts, it was impossible for me to believe that we could load a truck, drive to Tennessee, rent a place, and move in, just like that. I insisted we go to Tennessee for however long it took to find a place to live, then return to Worcester, pack my apartment and move. I think that psychologically, I also needed a buffer between returning from a three-month trip to Korea and moving away from my family for good.

In Tennessee, we stayed with X’s best friend and his family, and just like X had said, in a few days we found a house to rent for six months. It was a cute ranch with a deep front yard on a quiet street. The house had an open living room / dining area, small kitchen, two bedrooms and two bathrooms. My furniture from my huge apartment fit well and the house looked nice, but after we moved in, we could smell the damp, musty, dank odor that made us glad it was a temporary place.

The front door was metal and painted black, and offered third degree burns daily after the blazing sun had beaten on it for several hours. The neighbors next door had a ring of stones in the front yard, which they filled with trash all week, mostly cardboard beer cases, and burned each weekend.

The blue garden gazing ball on a wrought iron stand that was in my living room in Worcester was set in the front yard in a ring of flowers, and I could see it when the living room blinds were opened. That is, for a couple weeks anyway, before it was stolen from the yard, leaving nothing but clumps of dirt across the yard in the direction the thief had traveled. Not exactly the Welcome Wagon.

X’s household from when he lived in Gardner had been in military storage ever since he was transferred to Korea. One morning, about a month after we had settled in, we got a call from a driver of a truck that X’s stuff would be arriving in a day or two. The house went from comfortable to overcrowded with furniture in the blink of an eye.

The first months in Clarksville were spent sightseeing, visiting the local abundance of WalMart Supercenter stores (more per capita than anywhere else!), and looking for jobs. X had been stationed out of the area for several years and was excited to take me on his favorite former pastime of “driving around until we get lost in the country.” Unfortunately, everywhere we went, what he remembered as farmland had been replanted with subdivisions, and the only “getting lost” was in a seemingly never-ending series of cul de sacs.

By August, we were able to move into X’s house, located two miles away. As we were setting up house for the second time, we each found jobs. Mine was as a staff writer with bylines in a weekly newspaper, still one of my favorite jobs ever. His was with the corporate training division of a company with franchises nationwide.  It’s hard to believe all this was 20 years ago. Sometimes it feels like yesterday.