First off, a rare bit of good news: we found a home in College Town. It has a yard, and no weird smells. We are cautiously pleased. Now, on with your regularly scheduled blog installment.
When I was about 8 or so, I became enamored with the Choose Your Own Adventure series. You know the ones - you would read a few pages and be presented with a scenario, such as "Suddenly the lion rushes toward you. If you wield your backpack as a weapon and charge toward it, turn to p. 48. If you turn around and run as fast as you can, turn to p. 15." (If you still don't know the series that I mean, you can stop by your local library which, depending on your property tax base, is likely to either have the shiny new reissues of the series or extremely tattered copies of the originals. )
Here's a childhood confession for you all: when I would read these books, I would carry around a little spiral notebook - at least one of which was a pink Lisa Frank notebook of the sort most girls used to write about unicorns or draw Luke Perry's hair. Whenever I would come to a decision point, I would make note of the page it was on, and the decision I made. So in the above scenario, I would write "Page 5 (or whatever) - p. 15" (Even in my imagination, rushing a lion was not going to be my first choice.) I would proceed in this manner through various choices until I reached an ending ("The lion quickly overtakes you and swallows you in a single gulp. You died. The End."; there was no sugar-coating in these books, at least according to my memory.) At that point, I would go back to the last choice in my notebook, and try the one I didn't pick. Once I had attempted all of the options in a given scenario, I'd cross off the entry in the notebook, and go to the one before it on the list. In this way, I would progress through each and every scenario.
I share this with you not just to let you marvel at my nerdiness, though it truly was (and is) spectacular. No, I want to illustrate that from a relatively early age, I was not comfortable with the idea of the path not taken. In case you were wondering, the husband and I have not sold the condo. Early on in this process, the husband would begin to say, "If only we had kept renting" and I would say, "Hush, you. Nobody knew what would happen to the housing market." But lately I am finding myself wondering if, perhaps, we should have turned to the page that involved running far, far away from this place.
The thing about those books, though, was that there were a very limited number of endings, and there were always multiple configurations that led to the same end. And looking back, there were things in our scenario that are easy to conveniently overlook. Like the roach that we saw as we were moving out of our last apartment, in which we had never before seen a roach. And the fact that we really really love this place, and we are letting our stress make us forget that. I have a feeling that if our life was a Choose Your Own Adventure book, there would be a page that went: "You and your husband sit in a room filled with boxes, thinking about the disaster that was your last few weeks in this home. You are also sad because moving sucks! THE END" And no matter what choice we made, we would keep coming back to that.
Or maybe it would go, "You and your husband stand in your new CollegeTown home, surrounded by boxes. Tired and sweaty, you push your couch into the perfect location and think that whatever else happened, it is okay, because it brought you here." Here's hoping we're just a few page flips away from that one.
