Embracing Change: Leaving My City Home for the Countryside

I am leaving my house. Yes, the house me and R designed and adapted to be our forever home. With him gone I do find a huge comfort in the memories I have. The wall he built and the way the biofolds angle so that they will get more sun. Everything is just as we wanted, although I haven’t completed it. Not how we wanted. I just can’t cope with the house being this size and the design we had. Not me on my own. We had always thought we would be together to the end.

I guess most couples think that they will be together forever and that they will die close. R and I thought that the age gap between of us would be taken care of by the chronic conditions I have. My ailing body meant that relatively the age gap wasn’t huge. He was so fit and I was (and still am), well, not.

Except that fate had a say in the matter. So I haven’t put in the hot tub, nor have I kept up with the vegetable patch. And the next place has been chosen to accomodate me.

It’s a bungalow and with my knees killing me I am not going to miss the stairs, or the size of this place. We designed it to be big enough for two writers to work comfortably, one who loves twinkly music (my husband’s term for instramental stuff) and him to blast out punk rock. I mean in my study I could hear him but it was muffled. I do miss that muffled distant beat though.

Then there is the problem with the fact the heart of this place is gone. I have always taken comfort in nature and hearing the natural world. In a city I am more like to hear a siren than a bird. The bifolds help by maximising the link to nature, but it isn’t the same. I long for a garden with views over hills that will be populated by sheep and to hear the scream of birds of prey. I feel safe in the green and I really don’t in the grey world of concrete I currenlty exist in. I will miss having everything on the doorstep but I will feel safer in the odd little bungalow I have bought.

Not that this is a particularly unsafe area. It is just a normal suburban area in a city where there are so many people no one can remember your name. When R was here he placed himself between me and the grey and that meant I could cope. My home was R. Now he has gone I have found I can live here but I am always on edge. I hear the people talking around me, mowing lawns, arguing, singing, walking dogs… there is never a time when I can’t hear a person.

Padrig, my pup, of course finds the wild noises of the country unsettling. But he will get used to it. He will understand the language of the green. But for now we will continue to live amongst the grey and wait for that phone call to say all the legal stuff is complete and we can pack our bags and return to the countryside.