And on the 7th day.....

I wanted to find a lighthearted title for this week’s Substack. For the last week, I worked eight, nine, ten hours a day unmaking a world that I had built up around myself in Oakland, California since the Oakland Firestorm of 1991.

Backyard and terrace with gas fireplace off the bedroom

When my home burned down, I got the incredible opportunity (though I didn’t realise it at the time) to tell my architect exactly what I wanted in a house. I chose to simulate an adobe dwelling in Santa Fe. I was named after my great Aunt Sara who lived there most of her adult life and, romantic that I am, I thought this was a way of honouring her. I mixed the Adobe look with the Tuscan hills architecture around Florence where I spent one of the happiest times of my life. I chose doors from a company in Santa Fe, found mesquite wood at an antique store and asked the builders to plaster around it just as if it was adobe. I learned how to cut plastic garden pots in half, adhere them to the outside wall and stucco over them. Right side up, they became planters. Upside down they become covers for lights. The contractor let me design every nook and cranny (and there were many literal nooks and crannies where I could put all my treasures I’d collected in my travels) , and took my suggestions.

Most of it worked. Some of it didn’t. I closed in a deck and made it my bedroom and made my bedroom a sitting room. The entire top floor was a Master bedroom with french doors that opened onto a terrace with a gas fireplace, a table with six chairs, roses, coreanothus, a magnolia tree and a number of liquid amber. It was a sanctuary. As an old saying goes, I got out of that house exactly what I put into it: my heart and my soul. There were always animals running around as I volunteered at the Oakland Animal Shelter and couldn’t help myself.

In 2013, I had retired and decided to move to Paris for a year. As anyone knows who has been reading this blog since 2016, I fell in love with Paris. One year turned into two years. Two years turned into three. Eventually I was a resident in both countries and financially supporting two residences. As I grew older, I found it tiring to have so much responsibility. The idea that I had to make a decision about living in one place or the other developed long ago but was more a ping pong game in my head. I couldn’t land on a solution. I’d end up saying ‘if I could just beam my Oakland home over to Normandy, I’d be in heaven.’

Of course that was not going to happen. This winter, I made a decision before I realised I had. I decided to sell the sanctuary, leave California, and live permanently in Paris. My US presence would be in Ann Arbor, Michigan where my sister lives. I realised the decision was made at the end of a three month stay in Oakland. Immediately, I began to grieve and remember all the wonderful times in the house. I shut my feelings down temporarily and put the wheels in motion. I made reservations to return to Oakland on April 10th for one week. In that one week, I had to decide what I wanted to keep and would send to Ann Arbor; what I wanted to go to Paris — my hope is to find a larger apartment in Paris once the house sells; —and what to leave behind. I was referred to the most wonderful packer/mover, Amy McEachern, who showed me how to put blue stickies on anything going to Paris and yellow stickies on anything going to Michigan. She would come in with her crew after I left, and pack it all up and get it sent. Then another crew would enter the scene. They’d do an Estate Sale and liquidate what doesn’t sell. At that point, the house will just be a house. My sister has taken all the ceramic cats that lived in the back yard. Everything that possibly could be called a thing will be gone. Thirty years of what I loved, enjoyed waking up to in the morning, looked at when I climbed the stairs up to the bedroom will have traveled somewhere else. I got promises from everyone that that somewhere would not be a dump. The house would then be ready for staging. Staged by someone who doesn’t know the house, all her secrets and stories. I’m sure it will be beautiful but will it feel alive?

A week is not much time to make those kinds of decisions. I was afraid I would procrastinate. I didn’t think I would change my mind. I put out a Help call and friends came over to sit with me or make decisions with me. Either way, they provided energy so that I could get the work done and I got to spend time with them. By Monday, the 5th full day of work, I hit a wall, My exhaustion made me dizzy and I didn’t feel safe driving a car. I asked a friend if we could play Driving Ms Daisy. Amy called to ask if I needed a strong guy to come over and take things out of my attic so I could sort through it. I’d already seen what a mess it was up there. But I couldn’t remember any one thing that was there. I clearly hadn’t missed any of it in the past ten years. I thought about it for two minutes and then told her the truth. I couldn’t move my body, I couldn’t do any more work. I was going to leave it for the Estate and Liquidator people. The sixth day was spent with my realtor and going over everything to make sure the stickies had stayed stuck. And on the 7th day, I went to SFO and slept nine hours on the plane back to Paris.

For the next three nights, I slept twelve hours a night. I’m sad. But here’s the thing. For one of the first times in my life, I made a decision to let go. I had a choice. I didn’t have to wait until my beautiful home collapsed in an earthquake or burned again in a Firestorm. The choice I made was to let go of something I love knowing that it meant lots of tears, grief, sadness, and memories. I wasn’t going to mistake the sorrow for thoughts that I’d made a mistake. Letting go is hard and I’d been trying to avoid that for years. Letting go also means that I get to move on. I moved to Paris ten years ago. It’s taken me ten years to get the message that it was time to move on.

Or as a friend of mine says: “It is what it is and probably right on time.”

Abientôt,

Sara