Goodbye Baltimore

Three months have passed since I bid farewell to the city that I have called home longer than any other place except for the city of my birth and primary education.  After jumping from city to city every year or two for nearly a decade, I moved to Baltimore in 2005 with a beautiful woman who would become my wife two years later.  Moving to Baltimore meant settling into a great new job at an organization that values its employees and also allowed me to buy my first house, which was a distant goal living in Washington DC during the strong housing market of the early 2000s.  And yet, for some strange reason, even though I was with a woman I loved, engaged in fulfilling work, and living in a house I owned (or co-owned with Wells Fargo), it took me several years to embrace Baltimore as “home.”

But eventually Baltimore did feel like home.  I became familiar with the city by biking more than 10,000 miles in and around Baltimore, befriending vendors at the local weekly farmer’s market, participating in local races, and discovering why some people dub Baltimore as “Smalltimore” after seeing the same familiar faces at events, festivals, and restaurants. 

And then, near the end of last summer, I learned about an opportunity to work on a new youth development program in Palestine.  I went to Ramallah for three busy days of meetings in early August and left the West Bank intrigued and fascinated by this place--and I wanted to learn more about it.  I talked it over with my darling wife and she agreed that it was a compelling opportunity.

By late October, the move to Ramallah was set and preparations to leave Baltimore began.  My darling wife and I started trying to figure out what to do with a household full of our treasures, and also developed a long list of fixes—big and little—to tackle around the house.  After a post-Thanksgiving trip to Palestine with my darling to make sure it was somewhere she wanted to live, we started making slow but steady progress on the transition.  But we quickly realized that many aspects of a move inevitably crash on top of each other closer to the end than the beginning of the process.  (You can’t pack up clothes you need to continue wearing; you can’t pack a kitchen that you still need to cook in.)

We met with dozens of different potential service providers—movers, insurance providers, property managers, house repair companies, lead testing companies, etc.—and the pieces started coming together.  Just before Christmas, we held a moving sale hoping to catch the attention of last minute holiday shoppers looking for a bargain.  We sold a few bookcases and CDs, but it wasn't the retail splash we hoped it would be.

After the new year, I stopped going to the office for almost full two weeks to concentrate exclusively on household fixes, painting, cleaning-up, multiple trips to Goodwill, several trips to the dump (nothing like a move to shed light on the value of 'treasures' kept around the house and in the garage), trips to the hardware store, and packing.  The movers came to pack everything in mid-January, after which time me and my darling wife stayed with friends at night and went to the house during the day to continue cleaning, fixing, painting, etc.  

Finally, although the to-do list was not completely done, it was time for me to fly to Tel Aviv en route to Palestine and for my darling to go to her hometown to spend time with her family before moving 7,000 miles away.  I expected the flight to Tel Aviv to offer me relief, knowing that I had spent several months preparing for the move and that there was nothing more I could do.  Instead, my head was spinning as I continued to go through lists of pending tasks: I needed to finalize my new house insurance contract, complete insurance forms for the items I was storing and shipping, sign the contract with the property management company, and complete paperwork for the city to certify that my house was “lead safe” and that it was now a rental unit.  Plus, I left behind unfinished projects at the house—painting, replacing cabinet doors we had removed, replacing a bedroom door we had also removed, final cleaning, etc.  My darling would be left with managing that burden before she joined me in Palestine.  She valiantly finished off those projects, of course, and joined me in Ramallah roughly three weeks after I arrived.  The story of our search for new housing is next…