LEAVING THE NEST WITH GRACE or The way I did it, kicking and screaming at Kohl's

Thanksgiving 2019 should have been a lovely, fitting farewell to six decades of family life in a 1957 tri-level tract house on Buckingham Road. In some ways, it was lovely. The turkey dinner thoughtfully provided by Whole Foods was excellent and my mom, at age 99, was both appreciative and cooperative about downsizing decisions needed to allow her to fit into a one-bedroom apartment in a brand-new assisted living facility. There were just enough irritating issues - clogged toilet – leaf build up that prevented opening backdoor requiring Toby to become a mountain goat to get to the grass – insane thermostat that turned the downstairs into a sauna during the nightly marathon watching of Perry Mason re-runs – that should have made me eager to finish sorting, pack up and leave. But that’s not what happened. Instead, I spent most of each night lying in the bed I’d once occupied at my grandmother’s house, staring at the herald trumpet saved from a Junior Theater play some fifty years earlier and remembering. We left our cozy bungalow on Yost Boulevard (I know, an amazing coincidence) and moved into the construction in Ann Arbor Woods in 1959. I left all my friends and classmates in my fifth grade class to switch to Pattengill Elementary in the spring which meant that the first order of business was to find new friends. Accordingly, I hopped on my bike at every opportunity and cruised the neighborhood. I was lucky enough to find what I was looking for: Libby Tupper on Medford Court, Nancy Piepenbrink on Manchester. Kathy and Kay Bradley, on Nottingham, Susan Woods and Charlotte Maxwell directly across the street from each other on Essex. A couple of years later, my best friend from the first grade, Sally Strack, moved into a house on Essex and my joy was complete. My other early memories involve building forts. I created a crater in the top of a mound of construction dirt across the street that was like an eagle’s nest. My friends and I would meet there. My sanctum sanctorum at home was not my large, light-filled bedroom but the attic hideaway (plywood planks on the garage rafters accessible by two-by-four steps. I’d take a flashlight, molasses cookies and a Nancy Drew book up there to read. I loved watching my dad from my bedroom window shoveling snow under the street light on our corner. I loved the scent of grass when he cut the lawn in the summer. I loved watching him “spank” the tomato plants out of their containers to put them in the ground under my window. I loved the tetherball court he set up for me and my friend Anne Johnson. I loved the scent of my mom’s elegant perfume in my parents’s bedroom. And I loved the nearsighted family members had of removing our glasses and gazing at the glowing colors on the Christmas tree. When all the houses were built and filled with families, my folks and the others initiated picnics, softball games in the court, spoon-and-egg races, fireworks watching on the fourth of July and all sorts of get-togethers. It was a wonderful neighborhood to grow up in and, though I can no longer name all (or any) of the families on the street, the memories of the Dickinsons, Olsens, Mirageas, Margesons, and Kolbs, remain. Although I did few chores around the house, I nearly always had a job. My dad was a major networker and year after year he’d find me in the lounge chair in the backyard on the first day of summer to announce that he’d gotten me a job as a babysitter, a camp (Michigania) counselor, a salesgirl (John Leidy’s), a printer’s apprentice (Miracol), or a librarian at the Ypsilanti Press. In retrospect, I am grateful. I left the house for the last time last Saturday, going through the side door to the car parked in the driveway where, for years, I bounced a tennis ball against the garage door (breaking more windows that I can count.) I noted my mom’s ancient tobaggon still in the rafters and, for the last time, I touched the signature left on the wall by the brother who died in 1986: David E. For some reason, leaving the house I ceased to live in in 1972 was harder than the one in which Pete and I raised our children in Northern Virginia. Not that I am leaving Ann Arbor, my spiritual home. I will continue to come see my mom, but it will be different. I will be a visitor. Oh, for those of you who managed to muddle through my maudlin memories thinking they would be funny, the Kohl’s story is this: I’d ordered huge pallets of moving boxes from Amazon only to discover they weren’t needed, but to get a refund I had to haul them through Kohl’s to the Amazon return line. It was not a pretty sight and, in the midst of it, I got a call from my mother reminding me to stop at the Produce Station to pick up cole slaw (informational point – cole slaw is seasonal) and then another from my well-meaning brother to shop the Black Friday sale at Best Buy for a new TV for my mom. “And she says don’t forget the new set has to get the Perry Mason channel.” .