Letting Go

The leap of faith is begun

Dreaming of Italy is easy.
Moving to Italy anywhere is hard.

June 21, eight years and a month after moving into a home we built from the ground up, we moved out. That particular Friday, fittingly, was Summer Solstice. It’s a date to celebrate culmination, peak light, and clarity of vision. Solstice also means a gradual return to darkness and the time to embrace transformation and letting go. The 2025 edition of the longest day of the year brought me to my knees.

This move is the second-hardest thing I’ve done in twenty years. On my scale of soul exertion, it falls somewhere between a 2009 divorce and my 2024 Olympic-distance triathlon. Although the sifting of things started last winter, we got rolling in earnest around March. It took the better part of four months to finish packing up our life and stage the house for renters. Thank goodness I began the process in tip-top form, because by the time I drove away that last time, the needle on my tank read well below E.

Gone are the sofa and my six-pack abs. Both were jettisoned in service of a near-future we said that we wanted. What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t know until now, was the physical and psychic toll of getting there. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, as an object with mass travels faster and approaches the speed of light, acceleration becomes more and more difficult. As speed increases, the amount of energy required increases, too. Substitute speed of light with godspeed to Italy and you get the idea. March and April were challenging, and May hit hard, but the push through June damn near crushed us beneath the gravitational weight of our undertaking. Shouldering the task of emptying a three-story home is one thing; quite another is bearing the emotional strain of un-housing our children, parting from our parents, and walking away from that doorjamb every mom and dad knows, the one penciled with dated chits marking the crowns of little heads sprouting ever upwards.

7 humans, 8 years, 42-71 inches

Whether or not you believe in fairy godmothers, I can attest to witnessing a miracle. I’m a believer that after age forty, no one should enroll their friends’ tender spines for wrangling mattresses and furniture down three flights of stairs. Amy Lee and I did ninety-percent of it ourselves. Kids helped some and we also hired the local helper. This young man’s been knocking on neighborhood doors looking for five- and ten-dollar jobs since he first pulled up on a bike with no seat some years ago. Need leaves raked, stoop swept, weeds whacked, Tyshawn’s your guy. Between him and my wife, we got the big stuff handled. We unloaded condiments to pals with an empty cooler, pawned off useful gear to friends, and toted what we could to where we’re housesitting until departure. That left us with room after room of unclaimed miscellany like bar patrons at last call; they didn’t have to go to someone’s home, but they couldn’t stay here.

Tyshawn wasn’t the miracle who made it disappear, though. Instead, someone I hadn’t seen since 1991 streaked into my orbit like a comet. Armed with coffee, donuts, and an able-bodied gent with a pickup truck, this tactical squad of worker bees saved my ass. They knew just what to do with pillows and half-empty propane tanks, my dry cleaning and the remaining booze. They might’ve saved my marriage, too, as Amy Lee couldn’t fathom how in the final throes I still had cords and cravats and crates of unsorted unnecessaries. This wasn't a case of paralysis, I was moving every moment, it was just that. much. stuff. Comet Fairy Godmother¹ and I swept through a lifetime – my first Halloween, last day of kindergarten, college graduation, birth of my children – in Kodak prints and Polaroids damaged by Hurricane Sandy but left to me by my parents to deal with. In a twenty-minute span, Comet and I laughed-cried through a cinematic montage of the thirty-plus years we’d missed together.

The housecleaners came at 3:00pm. We pulled the door shut at 2:38 and by 5:30 we were toasting over cheap wine and calamari fritti to restore our spirits.

It’s been exactly a month since my last report. During these past four weeks, we’ve checked-off the minutiae of an international move: cancel cable, forward mail, request school transcripts. With health insurance expiring, we also made the rounds to providers while we’re still covered: eye doctor, dentist, dermatologist. Amidst packing, painting, and estate planning, all of these other things happened in the last thirty days, too:

I sat for a last stateside haircut and stood for farewell photos at Barboursville Vineyards. One daughter returned from her first year of graduate school and another finished her final year of high school. I served my last Virginia-brewed Americano and submitted my first Italian referendum ballot. I oversaw my final wine dinner and my successor’s inaugural trade event. I hiked one last waterfall in Oregon and surfed one last wave in Outer Banks. I drew up a resignation chock full of love and passed down a humidor stocked with cigars. Squeezed also into that month, I hosted a graduation party, attended a wedding, threw Julian’s super fat fun twelfth birthday, and finished Simon Van Booy’s wise slim book on the thirteenth. A nineteenth nervous breakdown reference could fit nicely right here, but I’m too spent to conjure one.

Yeah, it’s been a time.

There are unexpected consequences of making bold moves, like old friends coming out of the woodwork to bid farewell and share things unsaid. People with a nagging itch for change are calling for advice and big league opportunities abroad are materializing. My kids and intimates are freaking out more than a little, but so am I. The intrusive thoughts tend to visit around bedtime when the ego ponders a profound loss of easy self-comfort, status, and security. That inner voice shouting, “What have I done?” is awfully convincing. Don’t listen to it. There’s another voice, much quieter, murmuring in the background like a summer breeze, gently insisting you with a spritz to the edge of an Italian cliff overlooking an aquamarine grotto, “No, you don’t have to jump, but why the €%&# wouldn’t you?'“

A thread from this week

We’re down to counting hours and while I’d love to clack out big updates, it’s most likely that the next time you hear from me won’t be until I’ve lassoed a proper wifi signal in Verona. That said, I’m going to give paid subscribers the play-by-play from now to wheels-up, touch-down, and plug-in at our new place. If you’d like to stay in contact, I’ve set-up a special way to do so here:

16 days to go. 😬

1. I’m being cagey with the Who because this reunion comes with some thorny backstory that neither of us are quite ready to address.