Heaps Estrin's Blog

Moving is more than just trading one set of walls for another

Several years ago, when I was selling my house, a friend of mine encouraged me to employ a little trick she had used to expedite the sale. Take a wooden spoon from the kitchen, she said, turn the handle away from you and bury it in the garden.

Our houses hold our stories. We invest in them, not just financially, but emotionally and spiritually. This is partly why psychologists consider moving house the third-most-stressful life event, behind losing a loved one and divorce. There's the physical part of it, the packing and purging of things, but even if the move is a step forward, the farewell to the life lived within those walls can be difficult. We have to learn to let go of that chapter in our lives. Hence, the symbolism of a spoon, once used to stir up love and comfort in your kitchen, buried the handle facing away from the owner.

Like me, this friend had lived in her house for many years. It was where her newborns were Brough home from the hospital, where she and her partner had dreamed of their life together, the children they would have, the celebrations and the friends they would gather around their table.

"Our houses are pulsing with all that we carry in; they vibrate, hum, resonate with every cry and murmur and snap and cheer of our hearts," writes Dominique Browning, former editor of House & Garden magazine, in her book, Around the House and in the Garden, "They are our second skins, the shells we build, like snails, enlarging and encrusting with whorls of our days, months, years. They are the most private and the most telling places."

I often think of our homes as our private museums. We collect things and display them there, surrounding ourselves with reminders of how we see the world, where we have travelled and what we value. It is our spot in the universe that we can control, a safe place to dream and recharge.

During my years as a profile writer for magazines and newspapers, entry into a subject's home was the best way to understand them. It took a few days of trust-building for Criss Angel, master illusionist to let me into his residence at the apex of the pyramid-shaped Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas in 2008, where he was developing a show with Cirque de Soleil.

As soon as I entered, I knew I had my story. The custom-designed condo was filled with electronic games, a foosball table and a large electric train set that wound around the dining room. Mementoes including newspaper reports from his various Mindfreak TV shows, were encased in a glass cabinet. The decor throughout was goth, with skull-and-bones fabric on sofas and plush velvets - not a cheery colour in sight.

It was a Peter Pan man cave int he sky for the then 41-year-old "new Houdini," as he was being called. Her was still a boy in many ways, still vulnerable, layered with a defensive shield of silver, gold and diamond bling, playing out his childhood fantasies with his toys and his warehouse full of luxury cars and motorcycles.

I had a similar experience in Los Angeles in 2001 when I was writing about Molly Parker, the Canadian actress (Deadwood, Kissed, Suspicious River, Men with Brooms). Notorious for guarding her privacy and being coolly remote in interviews, she agreed to meet and we talked for several hours. Eventually, she invited me to come to her house in the Silver Lake neighbourhood. For someone so poised and composed, tidy in her responses, her home was relaxed and ordinary: a linoleum-floored kitchen, an old-fashioned fridge, pictures of friends plastered on the wall, a small garden out back where she loved to tend her flowers. In her bedroom, clothes spilled from drawers.

It felt unexpected, but it was a revelation: in the LA world of image and spin, a home of laid-back ordinariness was clearly an important counterpoint. Upstairs, in a. cavernous unfinished attic space, she stood silent for a moment, breathing deeply, and told me it reminded her of her hometown of Vancouver and how important that grounding is to her.

In the house moves that I have made in my life so far, each has marked a new beginning as well as an end to something. Canadians move five to six times in their lifetime, according to the Canadian Association of Movers, a number that likely reflects both tenants and homeowners. I have moved many more than that, as I grew up in a family with a father in business that necessitated moves across Canada and the world. By the time I was attended five schools in different cities.

As an adult, there was a starter home a family house; then a bigger house' a move after a divorce; a move after a wonderful 20-year chapter of rebuilding my life as a single mother and then in a new marriage; and a recent move with my second husband to a dream house by the ocean where we will grow old, garden and walk, and wake to a view of astonishing dawns.

All those moves, even the ones that were tinged with sadness - the loss of childhood friends, community and familiarity, the disappointment of  a failed marriage - I think of as cathartic. I moved on to new adventures.

And the spoon trick worked, just in case you're wondering. That particular house sold in a matter of days after I buried the spoon in the garden. It had been a very happy house, and maybe part of me was psychically reluctant to let that treasured period of my life go. Who knows? Maybe I wasn't just at the mercy of unpredictable market conditions.

I also reminded myself that while our stories and memories seem embedded in the walls of the houses we have lived in, they can become something beautiful, generous and invisible that we leave behind for the new owners, who will layer on their stories and benefit from the happiness we found there.

ABOUT SARAH HAMPSON
For over 20 years, Sarah Hampson was a columnist for the Globe and Mail, where she profiled hundreds of well-known figures in business, sports, politics and the arts. She also wrote for magazines in Canada and the U.K. Hampson has been recognized for her work with numerous prestigious awards. She has written two books: a memoir, Happily Ever After Marriage A reinvention in Mid-life, and a children's picture book, Dr. Coo and the Pigeon Protest. She splits her time between Toronto and Chester, a historic seaside village in Nova Scotia.