In the past few weeks, we have had an unusual number of nights where, usually sometime after midnight, Elisa or I are struck with insight. The kind of thing that makes you whisper-shout, oh no… we never planned for that.
The most recent one? The car.
We were lying there, running through a mental list of everything still left to do before we leave, when it hit me: what about the car? We do not have a parking spot in the city. If we left it on the street for a year, it would be towed within hours. And yet… somehow… we had never actually realized we would need to sell it.
So now, it is on the list. In between closing out our gym membership, applying for international driver’s licenses, double-checking our airline tickets for typos in the kids’ names, eating our favorite doughnuts on a Brooklyn stoop (pic below!) renting our apartment, and securing a year’s worth of prescription medicine (surprisingly hard, mind you), we are also figuring out how to sell a car in NYC that has about three engine warning lights on at any given Tuesday.
These moments fluctuate between anxiety-inducing and oddly reassuring. On one hand, thank God we remembered before the day of. On the other, there is the creeping fear that there are big things we have not yet thought of, or that we will not realize we have forgotten until it is too late. We are learning to live in the knowledge that inevitably we are going to forget some critical part of this transition, but the worst-case scenario is that we will lean on our community and friends to help tie up whatever loose ends are left.
Or, at the very least, Elisa will be giving some amazing stuff away on Buy Nothing.
