Everything's Coming Up Roses
TLDR: We bought a house and we're moving to Nashville!
I don’t know how to begin this story, because I have a sneaking suspicion that something was moving in my heart and my soul long before I caught onto it.
I can only begin where I caught up, and for today I’ll give you a brief and rough timeline.
In December of 2019 I spoke with someone who certainly has something that I can only describe as clairvoyance. She told me a lot of things but chiefly among them she told me that 2020 was going to be really bumpy, but I was going to be okay. At the end of our session she said, almost as a tossaway, “Don’t make any big decisions until July.”
In April of 2020, amidst my first few weeks in quarantine I started to nest into our house as a necessity. I also started a pen pal-ship with Morgan Yezzi, who, as he was heading out of town, brought me Alexander Chee’s book of essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. In it, there’s an essay called The Rosary. I read it and got homesick for a place I’d never lived before, and I knew that my time in Austin was coming to an end.
In June our friends Jon and Devon told us that they were buying houses in Nashville, TN, a deviation from what we thought they might do. We assumed they were destined to move to LA. I joked with Tucker on the way home from picking up groceries that we should buy a house in Nashville. And in the last days of June that joke evolved into a plan built from new values that the quarantine had instilled in us: the need to be closer to family, the need to put down some roots, and the need to plant a garden. We knew we were in alignment when our best friend, Stephanie, knew it was time for her to leave too.
So in July of 2020 we all settled into this new reality and set a goal. In one year we’d figure out a way to move closer to home. We decided to roadtrip to visit our friends' new houses in August, and we began to tell our friends and family.
We began to plan and plan, and that’s what we did for months. We saved money, we paid off credit cards, we did everything we could to work towards a goal that we weren’t even sure was achievable. We started looking at homes online as a pastime (along with the rest of the world, apparently).
In March I began the process of seeing what prequalification could look like for a home loan, and was told my self employment wouldn’t work because my work history wasn't in Tennessee. So I decided I’d try and get a full time job, and got scared that maybe our house dreams were squashed.
Around March, our friend Jon also bought roses for his house. On a catch up call he and I bonded over them and I told him that my story of moving to Nashville started with some roses in an essay. I sent him the essay and we bonded over this shared understanding of tending to something and yourself while making a home. We decided that the next time we saw each other we’d get rose tattoos.
In April I got a job at a small agency and in the same week I saw a house online. I’d seen it before and it was intriguing but it was still on the market in a market that is moving quickly. The price had just dropped and it was firmly in my pre-approval range.
I sent Jon and our realtor Larry to go look at it, and the whole house was covered in roses. Rose upholstered chairs, rose wallpaper, pieces of art that had roses on it, rose bushes in the backyard. Later we found out that there had only been one set of owners, who built the house and spent their honeymoon and then their entire life there.
I felt it. I felt the zing.
And then I started the whirlwind process of trying to buy a home out of state, that I’d never looked at with my own eyes. The process was overwhelming and very scary, but everyday I would see roses. Roses bloomed everywhere in Austin in April, rose petals would appear in our front yard, a friend visited New Mexico and brought me back a wooden bowl with a rose painted in it, I’d be crying over how stressed out I was and “Roses” by OutKast would start playing on the radio, I received rose infused honey as a gift for helping someone with a task. There were roses everywhere.
On Monday we had a disappointing walkthrough for the rose house. The previous tenants' family had left behind about half of their stuff, and we had to negotiate getting it handled. They paid for dumpsters and our day one, that we hoped would be pulling up carpet and painting, became going through all of their stuff and getting it out. As I left that night, feeling sad and scared, I saw the rose bushes outside, unbloomed and my heart broke a little bit.
The next day, our closing day, the day I feared might never come, I went back to the house again and the roses had bloomed.
To be honest, for something that felt so desired for so long, the first 48 hours were scary and rocky. There was so much stuff that needed to go, there were so many problems we didn’t anticipate, and there was so much to do.
But last night, as we had a toast in the previous owners' coupe glasses with Louis Armstrong’s version of “La Vie En Rose” playing in the background at the perfect time, I felt the zing again.
There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but it’s work we’re so excited to do.
DANG! You’ve made it this far! Thank you for supporting me by subscribing to this newsletter and sharing it with your friends. It means the world to me that you’d continue to invite me into your internet living room.
Let’s say for a second that you like what you see here and want to continue the support. In that case, you can do one or more of the following:
Forward this email to a few friends who would dig it.
Buy me a coffee.
Follow me on Instagram and share my work there.
Follow the publication I co-founded with the imitable Beth Hitchcock.
Hire me to write for your publication!
