This year, we will celebrate Thanksgiving by moving.

Specifically, on Thursday, packers will enter our home and start boxing up our possessions. There will be no turkey in the oven; by the end of the day there won’t even be forks with which to eat. We’ll spend the next few days in the in-between, split between two houses much like we’re already split between two countries. We’ll dine on takeaway and pull our clothes out of suitcases, and I’ll grow increasingly anxious and unsettled, and we’ll get a key over the weekend to start hauling some stuff over, and then on Monday–traditionally the busiest (and usually the worst) day of the week–movers will load up their truck with all those boxes and take them to our new location.

Except they aren’t called movers here. They’re called removalists. Which is apt, I think, being that what they do is remove things from your home. Unpacking those things and making their new environment a home? That’s up to us.

And we’ve done that here, twice. Two houses, each holding our family for a year. Each with its own view and features and advantages and disadvantages. I rejected this new house the first time I saw it, The Kid and Little Brother in tow, because I couldn’t see us there. Another house was higher on my list, a smaller and more traditional (less modern) one, with a turquoise backsplash that reminded me of our Atlanta home. I clung to that detail while this new, polished, marble-filled house imposed before me. I looked at the bidet and the sharp-edged stairs and the (I KNOW) indoor pool and shook my head. Didn’t suit us. Weeks later and still without options, The Husband and I took another look. This time, it suited us. Funny how things change.

And now, I’m imagining us there. I’m browsing rugs on the internet and placing wall hangings in my mind. I’m arranging furniture and envisioning dinners with friends. This morning, I took a hike.

After dropping LB and then TK off at school, I hoofed it to the new house to map out the walk from TK’s school. On the way there, I saw a path with a sign marking its entrance: path to beach. A few minutes later, I found myself on a tiny beach in front of a harbour full of boats. I gazed across at the restaurants we’ve already frequented, a short walk away. I gazed upward and saw our new house on the hill. I imagined the four of us on this beach, swimming and building castles. Right below our house. Suddenly moving didn’t seem so burdensome.

I miss turkey. I miss the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Westminster Dog Show. I miss wine on the couch with my sister and sarcastic comments from my dad and letting my mom clean everything up (kidding. Or not.). I miss the temperature dropping and Christmas creeping in, slowly, until the day after Thanksgiving when it barges through completely. I miss shorter days and dark, sacred nights around the holidays. I miss not moving every year. New is hard, worrisome, and often defeating.

But maybe I need to be defeated, annually it seems? Because there is also this: TK delivering speeches to his class. LB showing me rugby moves. TK’s therapists telling me they’ll be fading out of school completely in the next year. LB singing me songs from the toilet. Both of them running off to join their friends at school and birthday parties and on beaches. There is this picking up–this removal–and dropping back down to somewhere different, where new life is to be found. Life I would never have sought out of my own, as I like to stay still thank you very much.

The other day I was walking home (to our current one, anyway) after a different hike. I spotted a snake in the tree in front of the house and snapped a quick photo of it, then ran inside to tell TH. He spent the next few minutes on his phone, researching the type and danger of the animal. Turned out it could either be very poisonous or completely safe, based on some colouring patterns that we weren’t willing to venture close enough to the creature to see. Over the next few days, the snake continued to hang in the tree, unmoving. We reasoned that it had died there. But not other creatures came to pick at its remains. Could it be…? A few days later, I noticed it lying on the ground in exactly the same position it had been in the tree. Plastic. The damn thing was a toy. It had been harmless the whole time.

Much of what I’ve feared in life, what I’ve obsessed over and worried about, has been, in the end, harmless. Some of it has not. In this case, TH simply tossed the thing into the trash with all of the others things we’re letting go of as we re-move yet again to a new view, together.