Moving 1,300 miles with two cats

I sold my house of 10 years. The day before the closing, I put my two cats in their carriers into my old Honda Accord and with every crevice of the car full, I drove to Westerly, Rhode Island where my boyfriend lived.

The adventure began. I had medicated the two babies, Lucky and Rocky and I didn’t hear a peep the entire ride down, which took about an hour.

Two days in Westerly were traumatic enough for Rocky, the youngest at 13 years of age. Guilt washed over me like a typhoon as I felt I had ripped them from their home and everything they knew: their comfort, their territory, their corners, where it smelled familiar and where the daily routines had been ingrained for a whole decade. In contrast, after a few curious strolls around the house, Lucky plopped on the bed and slept, or looked outside the window at birds or the occasional car, and his change of scenery didn’t seem to faze him one bit.

Rocky, on the other hand, found any corner to hide in, behaved aggressively and transformed into this feral creature I didn’t recognize, as he hissed, growled like a panther and scratched the living daylights out of our skin. He had passed on his anxiety and fear onto me a couple months back every time I had to remove him during an open house when car rides and strange houses were involved.

Lucky

The vet had sold me two things: one was kitty Prozac and the other was a pheromone spray to put around the carrier or space 15 minutes prior to their presence. He told me I should start the pill two weeks before leaving, but after two days, I had stopped, because these boys were not themselves. They were shadows of their normal selves and I only resumed drugging their food two days before departure. We left Rhode Island on May 3^rd, and these guys were nearly comatose. I almost thought that the spray was more effective without side effects for them, just a lingering unpleasant smell that was still faintly present in my car, three weeks later.

Rocky

Our first stop was right off the highway in a place I had never heard of, Emporia, Virginia, then two days in Myrtle Beach, SC, a place I had always wondered about, but will no longer, as I found it to be too commercial for my taste even though we did find the best tasting Thai sweetened iced tea on the planet somewhere in town. Then two days in Saint Augustine, Florida which were very pleasant, and finally we spent an entire week at a La Quinta in Fort Pierce, FL right off the highway, where the ample room didn’t do much for Rocky’s unhappiness. He kept sleeping in the smallest of carriers, and it didn’t matter if we were in the room or not, it seemed he didn’t leave his cage.

Lucky at La Quinta

While at La Quinta, we would leave them in the room, and we would venture off looking at places to rent. It wasn’t easy to find a place that would be willing to do short term rentals, accepting of cats, but after what seemed  million phone calls, we lucked out and found a 1 bedroom 1 bath condo on a gated community right on Hutchinson Island, a miserly 3-minute walk from the beach, one of the reasons we were relocating.

Rocky at La Quinta

After lugging the contents of our cars into the 2^nd floor unit, we couldn’t believe we were steps from the ocean – we could even see a little bit from our screened narrow balcony. I opened the oversized glass sliders, and the cats immediately ventured outside. The sound of the birds, the hot breeze and the scent of the sea provided a cocktail of hope for us and the curious cat kids. Deep down, I knew we were going to be alright.

Do you ever feel in limbo?

The limbo state that occasionally happens in our lives can really rock our foundation (our root chakra). Our roots are shaken.  When this happens, it can be due to a plethora of reasons. There is fear of something not being provided for. It could be something your physical body needs, such as sleep, food or shelter.

In my case, it’s shelter. I am very lucky I have always been able to provide a roof over my head, but I am in transition at this precise moment. My house is for sale. I have had a few offers that didn’t pan out and now another one underway.

All my friends who have sold a house have told me that it’s one of the most stressful experiences you can have, and they are right. It is daunting to always been cleaning every two seconds. My hair has to be kept in a pony tail (when my autoimmune thyroiditis is out of whack, my hair falls more than the average amount), so I am not picking up behind me after my every step. I have to keep all surfaces clear of everything and every time there is a showing, I have to lock up my two fur babies in their carriers and leave them in the office for about an hour. I have timed an hour, because people show up ahead of time and sometimes they are late. I am never there, as the realtors come in when the house is empty of humans.

When I have open houses, which has happened almost every Saturday, I actually have to remove the cats. They are indoor pets and everything relating to a car is scary to them. Because this is happening in winter time, I can’t leave them in the car with the windows open, even if I have to go into the grocery store. So, some of my friends have welcomed me in, and even sometimes with pets of their own, we have to strategize on how to put these two in a separate closed room, oblivious to their own pets. After all, pets are highly sensitive and very territorial.

So, my poor honeys have to stay in strange surroundings and go on these outside adventures from time to time. Luckily, we have not had any accidents. I would be mortified if that ever happened.

Now I am packing more boxes, which tells me I still have a lot of stuff and I have donated a ton more. My accountant asked me how many bags I had donated: 5 or 10? I laugh. There were a few months last year when my car would be packed with bags every week, sometimes suitcases, and it is tough to put a value amount to things you have parted with.

With all the stuff leaving the house, the disruption of constant cleaning and the house not feeling my own, I wonder where I will be once it sells. I can’t really make any moving or renting plans until I have a date for that. In essence, this suspended state of limbo leaves one with the roots shaken. The big question mark at the end of the tunnel is where will I be?

I have found some destressing mechanisms: Reiki, which has been my life saver for over a decade, essential oils (the ones I use here) and meditation. This last one is the toughest one for me. Time is a factor. The life of the nomad continues, as I camp in my own home.

The Birth of a Writer

I can pinpoint the start of my writing “career” when I was 9 years old. I am not sure if it started in Portuguese, French or English, but I started writing stories when my age only had one digit, and it is hard to believe how fast time flies.

First, I used a pen and paper. There were lots of scratches and rewrites. Then came the typewriter, the computer ancestor, and I trust that many of you reading this never had to use this writing dinosaur, and I am not talking about the electric ones either. I am talking about the ones with ribbons and rollers, where one would get so aggravated because the sheet of paper you rolled into it did not line up straight. You’d have to remove it and all start over. If you made a mistake typing the wrong letter – the metal with the letter engraved would loudly snap onto paper through an ink cloth ribbon, there was no way to delete it or use an eraser without poking a hole onto the paper. Whiteout could be used, but it would still be messy, and you knew exactly where it was as it topographically jumped off the page like a tiny plateau pinpointing your mistake.

Eventually, I wrote on a desktop computer. The printers back then were not as sophisticated, and neither were the computer fonts. You didn’t have the plethora of choices you have now, and when the paper came out, the light ink was very electronic-looking, and you had perforated vertical edges that you had to tear away. Can you imagine? It seems of another century now. And it was.

Historically-speaking, I used a pen or pencil and a paper, whether it was a notebook or not, it didn’t really matter. I had no intent on what to do with my stories. I just had them in my head, and they needed to be birthed.

Academically, I attended a French Lycée and during the 80’s and 90’s, the curricula or the teachers never focused on creative writing, so I always deemed what I was doing as fun, as a secret past time I did at home, when I wasn’t drowning in hours of homework or reading or immersed in some physical educational out-of-a-school activity. I never heard of the term “creative writing” until I got to the United States when I was eighteen.

I entered a Liberal Arts school like a fish out of water, first time alone in my life, in another country and speaking English with a British accent, the English I had learned in French school. Soon enough, I started to become self-conscious about my accent and I tried to mimic the American accent I heard all around me. In hindsight, I wish I had stuck with it, as I learned much later that Americans love accents. An accent can sound exotic, intellectual and mysterious. Evidently, I had missed that memo, so terrified about being noticed.

When I saw Creative Writing being offered as a college course, I signed up. It took me over two years to decide that it should have been my major all along, but I missed the deadline by two weeks, when I could have double-majored. It’s my own fault. I didn’t have the self-confidence I have now. I had seen myself as not good enough throughout – perhaps a mindset stemming from my younger years, plus I told myself that due to the fact that English was my third language, I could never be as good as a native speaker. I know now how misguided that was.

So, I wrote quite a bit during my college years: poetry, plays, essays, short stories. Influenced by others who told me I could never make money with writing, I started my master’s degree in marketing communications two weeks after graduating from my bachelor’s, and I set aside my writing calling.

I was still writing papers, but I had abandoned creative writing, labeling it a thing of the past.

Fast forward to age almost 29 when I was already married and working. My cousin decided to give me a 4-day writer’s workshop on Martha’s Vineyard for my birthday. I told her that it would be a waste of money, because I hadn’t written in years, but maybe it was the artist in her who still saw a glimmer of the writer in me and insisted on it.

I reluctantly went to Nancy Slonim Aronie’s Writing from the Heart workshop in Chilmark, MA, feeling a heaviness, a fluff-less batter of shame, guilt and inadequacy. However, it didn’t take that many minutes into the first day of the workshop for me to realize, it didn’t matter that I had silenced the writer in me years earlier. The words flowed on the paper, as if I had never stopped writing. Poetry, prose, non-fiction and fiction poured out of me, like a freed dam. I didn’t know what to do with it.

After four days of intense writing, Nancy validated me as a writer, and when she autographed her book for me, she added the words “You ARE a writer!” I could have cried in that moment. It’s as if she was recognizing the gift in me and giving me permission to carry on, to continue creating. I told her I didn’t really know how to fit it into my life. She urged me to create a writing group upon returning back home.

My first published collection available here

I posted some flyers at the town library, and pretty soon, the Nomad Writers came to life. I was told that it would be unlikely that a writer’s group would meet more than once or twice a month. I stuck to my guns, because I wanted to be writing once a week. We would meet on Monday nights at 6. There was much turnover for a time, and I slowly figured out how to structure the group, so it would become a safe sacred space, where creative writing was the focal point and where people wouldn’t be permitted to disrespect or put down another person’s writing. It had to be a place where constructive feedback would be given and where writers would feel free to create, evolve and soar. Several people didn’t think it would be possible, but once there was a core group that was committed to show up every single Monday at 6, the Nomads became solid. We respected one another’s work, and the only thing that ended up happening was location changes, thus the name Nomad Writers. For the past 15 years, we have been faithfully meeting. We are a closed group and have been at the same library for a while now, and all of us are published. We have also collectively created two anthologies over the years. We have lost Nomads to cancer or moves. But we remain strong and we keep creating. I know that Monday nights are a special time for creative writing, and thus I am honoring my past 9-year old self who would write stories in an 8^th floor apartment in Lisbon, Portugal.

Perfect blend to feel joyful while writing and maybe getting my English accent back.

What I learned from Cuz Wendy and Marie Kondo

Part 2

Open houses on Saturdays and showings during the week and sometimes on Sundays, that was my life. My schedule was dictated by the showings. I had to literally work and schedule things around this huge endeavor.

Several people have told me that selling a house is one of the most stressful and biggest things one can undertake. I mentally paused. Indeed, our home is our safe haven. It’s literally our foundation, where about half our lives is spent, as our beds cocoon us every night and let our bodies recover from the day. 

If we were trees, our home is equivalent to the roots. Home is linked to the root chakra: where we feel safe and provided for, where our bodily needs are met - eating, sleeping, loving. Home should be a place of security, comfort and familiarity, where we nest, grow and live. It’s the floor beneath our feet, holding the bed when we are sick and sometimes our final resting place. They say home is where the heart is, and that is literally where your heart is half of the time.

When I was talking to my cousin Wendy, who coincidentally is going to be listing her house soon, she commented how this house had been good to me and asked me if I had thanked my house. I was silent for a few seconds, thinking about this. I did Reiki on my house to clear the energies. I anointed the air by diffusing pure essential oils (these are the ones I use). I cleaned, vacuumed, dusted every surface. I painted it, I improved it, I fixed it. I had poured much love into this house, but no, I had not actually thanked “her.” The word for house in Portuguese is feminine, so I am calling my house “her.”

I had to thank her. So, I did. I thanked her for being my home. I had found her in disarray almost 10 years before. I had given her quite a makeover, with many improvements over the years, and I acknowledged that more still needed to be done. I told her that the next people who live here would hopefully continue that task, and that she would be the haven that she had been to me for another family. It felt good to thank her and it reminded me of Marie Kondo, when she helps people tidy up their house on Netflix, the first thing she does is “feel” the spirit of the home. She kneels, closes her eyes, and mentally and spiritually connects with the house, greeting it and offering her respect for it. In a way, even though I did not kneel when I thanked my house, I was connecting mentally and spiritually with it, and thanking “her.”

It was not under my control when the right buyer would come along or when I would be moving. Our plan was to explore a new area and start a new chapter elsewhere, but first things first. Just like Julie said, there is a step for everything in this process, and my other half said: “Patience, dear.” If only I could muster some of that! I had to: my life depended on it.

What I learned from cuz Wendy and Marie Kondo

Part 1

I have never sold a house. I had been a renter prior to buying my first house, this house. I didn’t really have any expectations of the whole process, but I knew it was going to be a learning experience. In my mind, I had set a date to go to market: October 1^st.

I started sorting through my stuff in August. I contacted three realtors I knew, to come up with market analyses. I ended up choosing my friend Julie Etter, a top selling realtor in her company. She came to my house with a stager. I was petrified of the word “stager” to begin with. And this one meant business. She would float in and out of the rooms with her notepad, silent, but writing, making comments if I uttered anything. The more she navigated through my overstuffed house, the more uncomfortable I became. This heavy feeling doomed over my head, and I trembled at the outcome.

At the end, she handed me two pages of handwritten notes, room by room, task by task. I almost fainted. My eyes homed in on the most complex of projects: she wanted me to finish one of the rooms in the basement. It had been my intention to do that for the past 7 years, but between the aftermath of a flood, and using my basement as storage for 3 adults, I never got to it.

What I needed to do, in between sorting, decluttering, donating, trashing and packing, was buy trim for doors, windows and closets, cut it at a 45˚ angle by hand – I wasn’t planning on purchasing an electric saw before moving, buy and install new ceiling tiles, paint, install baseboard. The project seemed daunting and I didn’t want to spend too much money so we decided to do it ourselves.

During breaks, I would sort, trash, donate, pack. That seemed to be my life and by the time October 1^st rolled around, I had already warned Julie I wasn’t ready to list the house. Not only did I have a ton more to pack, but I hadn’t crossed off enough stuff on the stager’s list.

That list was going to be the death of me. I am one of those people who might not be the most organized person in the world, but if you put a list in front of me, I become obsessed with it. And tackling the hardest project on the list had to be number 1. My other half and I work well as a team, and we took turns sawing wood (which I do not recommend, as you may get red callouses if your hands are manicured).

So, two months later, I had not only finished the list, but also freshly painted my bedroom, my dining room, the entry way and part of the kitchen. Julie came over and so did her photographer, a young woman who went throughout the house and clicked away without a peep. After sitting down with Julie and discussing how I would be gone for half of December, we decided to wait one more month until January 2^nd.

Ominous date indeed, as it was our anniversary. It had to bode well. So right before I left for the holidays, I also decided to paint my second kitchen in the in-law, as that had been the last thing I had set out to do. The list had not included painting rooms, with the exception of the finished room in the basement.

The overachiever in me had to do it so I could feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, knowing that it was the best I could do for the next owners.

On January 2^nd, Julie came over and showed me the listing preview. Later that day, the listing was live. It is a strange sensation to have the inside of your house on display for everyone to see. This is what house hunting is: you judge the house by the photos, then you go see it.

I knew I would have to clean a lot more often (it seemed like every single day) and I knew I would have to remove my two cats from the house, hide their litter boxes in the basement, leave all the lights on.

The first time was the first open house on the first Saturday of the year. I frantically rushed to see if everything was perfect: all the lights on, my diffusers running throughout the house (more later on which essential oils I used) and Julie arrived twenty minutes earlier as I flew out with the two cat carriers in hand. The poor babies were facing each other in the backseat of my car. My 12-year old meowed: the scared kind of cry. In total, I was away for about 2 hours. I had booked a manicure, so I could get my mind off of what was happening at my house. But the stress didn’t leave me. I got back to the car and still killed some time. I felt guilty about subjecting my pets to this, but this was all part of the process. I wondered what came next.

This is a perfect blend for an open house or showing.
Citrus oils both uplift and calm, aside from smelling clean and fresh, and I thought it was a great choice.