To Narnia In Ill-Fitting Shoes
Jun. 21st, 2013 01:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousI can get the kids to help me pack upstairs--help in the sense of staying on the second floor where I can hear what they're up to--by opening any closet door. Gareth shouts "Narnia!" and runs in so hard he bangs all his body weight into the back wall. Conrad, of course, follows suit. Before I packed my good teaching clothes, I suppose we could say he followed suits, plural.
Lucy and her siblings ventured into Narnia in oversized fur coats that reeked of mothballs. If my boys dressed for always-winter-never-Christmas in my closet, they'd have to settle for my doctoral robes, which smell better but wouldn't be nearly as warm. Grown-ups' footwear fascinates my kids, so they clonk around the hardwood floors in the few remaining dress shoes from my classroom teaching days. I picture Mr. Tumnus's faunly hoofprints in the snow alongside the blurred prints of two pairs of chunky-heeled pumps. Really, it'll be no loss when those shoes get left in Narnia. Perhaps talking field mice will make a good village of nests in them.
Narnia feels more real than this fact: Three more weeks, and we're out of this house forever.
The MLS listing goes live tonight. On Monday, we'll have a screwball comedy set piece's worth of characters coming all at once: the realtors, to take photos; the gutter repair people, with tall ladders worthy of a Buster Keaton routine; the first prospective buyers and their agents; moving company representatives, to cook up estimates of the cost of moving all our goods that aren't already in storage. I have to be here to greet most of these people, so the kids will be here, too. I imagine it will play out sort of like the climactic scene in One, Two, Three, with me playing James Cagney's role. It's a marvel of accelerating pace, that old film, and the skittering score of the fastest scenes runs in my head on a daily basis.
Slow things fall out of my life, or get packed up until there's a new house to live them in. I've made my farewell-for-the-summer post on Black Gate, said my last goodbyes to nearly all my students, and glumly accepted that the parts of my mind that write fiction have retreated into their cave to wait out the storm. The parts of my mind that handle logistics envy them the retreat.
Gareth wants to know if we can move to Narnia instead of Maryland. That would be farther from family even than Jersey, and I can't vouch for the Narnian public schools, so no. It's starting to sound pretty good, though.
Lucy and her siblings ventured into Narnia in oversized fur coats that reeked of mothballs. If my boys dressed for always-winter-never-Christmas in my closet, they'd have to settle for my doctoral robes, which smell better but wouldn't be nearly as warm. Grown-ups' footwear fascinates my kids, so they clonk around the hardwood floors in the few remaining dress shoes from my classroom teaching days. I picture Mr. Tumnus's faunly hoofprints in the snow alongside the blurred prints of two pairs of chunky-heeled pumps. Really, it'll be no loss when those shoes get left in Narnia. Perhaps talking field mice will make a good village of nests in them.
Narnia feels more real than this fact: Three more weeks, and we're out of this house forever.
The MLS listing goes live tonight. On Monday, we'll have a screwball comedy set piece's worth of characters coming all at once: the realtors, to take photos; the gutter repair people, with tall ladders worthy of a Buster Keaton routine; the first prospective buyers and their agents; moving company representatives, to cook up estimates of the cost of moving all our goods that aren't already in storage. I have to be here to greet most of these people, so the kids will be here, too. I imagine it will play out sort of like the climactic scene in One, Two, Three, with me playing James Cagney's role. It's a marvel of accelerating pace, that old film, and the skittering score of the fastest scenes runs in my head on a daily basis.
Slow things fall out of my life, or get packed up until there's a new house to live them in. I've made my farewell-for-the-summer post on Black Gate, said my last goodbyes to nearly all my students, and glumly accepted that the parts of my mind that write fiction have retreated into their cave to wait out the storm. The parts of my mind that handle logistics envy them the retreat.
Gareth wants to know if we can move to Narnia instead of Maryland. That would be farther from family even than Jersey, and I can't vouch for the Narnian public schools, so no. It's starting to sound pretty good, though.
