The Portal is a Flower

On moving houses and honoring the spaces that hold us

We hit July and the countdown begins: mere weeks before Z and I leave the house we’ve lived in for eight years. First as a band, with our bandmate in the other bedroom, then as the two of us while I wrote three more albums and we got married and tried to start a family, and then as a trio again, with our son growing from a piglet-soft newborn to a gregarious two-year-old.

The house that brought us into proper adulthood. The house that held us through a pandemic. The house that saw love and grief and blood and dreams.

I haven’t felt that sentimental about leaving—not yet at least. We’re only moving 15 minutes away, and our lives won’t fundamentally change. We’ll still see Anthony at the coffeeshop, and Amy at the bookstore, and the red-haired cashier who always gives River a sticker at the Price Chopper. But I remember when we left our Brooklyn apartment back in 2016, it was only when we wheeled our suitcases down Eastern Parkway that Z and I both really cried.

So maybe it’ll hit me when we roll down the driveway for the last time and drive off down River Street, the road saturated with the memory of summertime berry walks, walks to the river, late-night walks home from the Pub. The spot where we saw the owl. The spot where we saw the pair of green herons. The LOVE LIFE graffiti fading underneath the train trestle. One last look over our shoulder at the house through the trees, the orange doors blooming through the twilight.

As a parting gift, we painted the doors the color of a nasturtium. Perhaps it’s a weird move to pick such a wild paint color right before you move, to leave the blatant trace of your personal aesthetic for the next owner to deal with. But we’d talked about painting the doors for so long, and the vacant white and unstained trim seemed so unfinished, we couldn’t help but fill it in. Like a graffiti tag, a way to say: we were here. We loved life here.

I feel like I should hold a ritual, a ceremony of goodbye. But then I remember that there have been a hundred little rituals over a hundred months, meaningful ways of honoring this place we always knew was not our forever home. Like planting perennials along the stone walkway, even though we won’t be around to watch them bloom. Like foraging the onion grass and nettles to fill our bodies with this land. Like painting the doors to match the nasturtiums growing nearby, the portal between inside and outside dissolving just a bit.

I grew up about an hour from here in a red house with blue shutters, directly across from the town’s oldest cemetery. The house was supposedly a former tavern. I lived among ghosts.

When we first moved into our current house in 2017, I was struck by how similar it was to that childhood home. The same sloping floors, the same modest farmhouse exterior. The same Narnian closets, voluminous blackness billowing at the back of them, the darkness itself like a garment: musty, rich, furred.

But most noticeably, both houses were completely surrounded by tall trees, the rooms inside always a few degrees cooler than you’d expect. When I went to plant perennials at the River Street house, I drew from the knowledge of that childhood yard, things I knew would grow in these conditions: lungwort, bleeding heart, Solomon’s seal.

Next time we move, I’d always say, we’ll find a place with full sun. I wanted to grow peonies and delphiniums. I dreamed of fat purple-black eggplants and tomatoes bursting on the vine. I yearned to see the sky, to watch the sun set and the moon rise.

And yet, the house we’re moving to now is also deeply shaded. I have to laugh at myself—how did I let this happen?—but it makes sense. When we first went to view the house, the moment I stepped out of the car, I felt at home. Of course I did—it was the landscape I have lived in my entire life. Walking that land, all dreams of peonies faded to the background. Visions of vast meadows fell away.

I realize now that as much as my skin craves the sun, my soul is at peace in the dappled light of forest.

Though I will almost certainly cry when we close and lock the nasturtium doors for the last time, I am starting to understand that home will follow me wherever there are trees. That home is a quality of light, a canopy of branches, a dappling.

There is one corner of the new land, a brief opening between copses, that actually does get some sun. On my second visit to the house, I wandered back there and found a fistful of yellow foxgloves. Stalks of little golden horns blaring ceremoniously in welcome. Also known as fairy gloves, these plants are thought to be among the most magical of all.

At some point, we’ll want to paint the new doors too. We’ll go down to Herrington’s to look at color swatches, and through that rainbow of possibility, I’ll know it when I see it: the perfect shade, the one that will mark the opening to our forever home, softening the edges of the portal to the outside world.

The doors will be foxglove yellow, trumpeting us home through the twilight.