How It Went

We moved Alyssa to College Town the last weekend in July. It took three vehicles to carry all her stuff. I mean, she might have been able to condense it had it been absolutely necessary but since we had N’s truck (mostly for the desk and chair), my car and Alyssa’s car, we made the most of the room we had.

We started packing up the vehicles around 1:00 and were on the road by 2:00. It takes us about an hour and twenty minutes from driveway to driveway. So, yeah, not that big a deal.

We got all her boxes, the desk, the new air fryer, and, most importantly, her backpack in which Bubby, her stuffed dog, was zipped with just his head out for show, moved into the living room of N’s sister’s house. Poor L and T (L is N’s sister, T is the sister’s husband.)

We didn’t take it all upstairs, which is where A and N will be living (two bedrooms and a bathroom) because N wanted clean the rooms before filling them up with Lyss’s stuff. I get that but the piles of boxes in the living room made me feel bad for L and T.

Anyway! We offered to take A and N out to eat before we headed west for home. We ended up at Denny’s.

**Note to self: Do not order Denny’s patty melt…ever again. Remember those last twenty minutes in the car before the next gas station came into sight…just saying.**

Ahem. Lunch/dinner was fine, we headed back to the house to get my car and go home. We hugged in the house and then again in the driveway. Tom gave an exaggerated wail and the three of us, Tom, Olivia and I, got in my car.

We were fine even as Lyss waved from the front porch.

As we drove away, all was well. We were maybe twenty minutes away when Tom said something about Alyssa’s room.

For what it’s worth, we’d had this conversation before, with him insisting that it’s silly to keep it as it is because it’s SPACE and we need (read: HE needs that space.) He does not need that space. He has a barn (it’s a small barn but it’s still a BARN.), a detached garage with a loft (so, two stories) the entire basement, through which I walk a path between his rows upon rows of STUFF to the laundry room. He also has the family room and about a quarter of the living room.

All of that space mentioned in the paragraph above? It’s dedicated to eBay storage. Yes. Let that sink in.

So when I made some kind of noise when he mentioned taking of Lyss’s room all of three hours after she moved out for her freshman year of college, he asked defensively, “Well, what do you want to do with her room?”

I said simply, “I want to let it be her room.”

He wanted to know why. According to him, she’ll NEVER live in our house again.

Dude, never say never. And wait, what the actual hell? She’s eighteen years old. She’s going to come home for holidays, he has no idea if she’ll ever be home to live again. Instead of saying all that, I started crying.

Because why not?

He was shocked. Why was I crying? He said, “I thought you were over it.”

I sniffled. “I’m not crying because she’s moved away to school. I just want to let her keep her room in our house for at least this first year. We don’t know what’s going to come. She needs to be able to always come home.”

He made some kind of noise and I sniffled some more. My nose got all stuffed up from the crying and then the patty melt from Denny’s kicked in.

Just before we reached the gas station that brought me great relief, Tom agreed, “We can keep it her room for awhile.”

That’s big of him, right? But honestly, it’s the right thing to do, for her and for me.

The next morning, I woke up with a head cold. Late that day, as I walked around sniffing and coughing, Olivia asked me how I caught a cold.

I told her that Dad made me cry the day before and that made my nose stuffy and it just never got unstuffy.

She declared, “So it’s Dad’s fault you have a cold?”

Sure, let’s go with that.