Kicked Out of Our Rental House

On December 30, 2021, (what my family calls “New Year’s Eve Eve"), my husband got a text from our landlords. He probably thought, when he saw it was from this kind older couple, that it was to wish our family a Happy New Year. We had been good tenants for three and a half years, always paying our rent on time, keeping up the yard and making minor repairs inside and outside the house. But the text said they wanted their house back as soon as possible.

It wasn’t us, it was them. They wanted to live in their five-bedroom house again for the sake of their new grandchild. Our lease was going to be up that July, but if we left early, there would be no penalty. They wanted us out as soon as we could find another home.

My husband and I have owned homes and rented homes, but we had never been asked to leave one before! It felt like our family was being kicked to the curb. Happy New Year!

I cried for hours that night, more than I ever thought I would about leaving this boxy “newly renovated” house with all white walls, white plastic window blinds and white kitchen cabinets. It was never my taste, but now, after nearly two years of global pandemic, IT WAS MY PLANET!

Before March 2020, it was just a rental house we’d lived in since 2018. We moved to be closer to my husband’s work and walking distance from a good school for my son. My daughter was away at college, and I was working on an online Master’s degree. I even managed to look for a part-time job, one time interviewing on a new computer thing called Zoom. That was weird.

I was employed as a tutor in 2019. Now I had a job to leave my house for on evenings and weekends! My teenage son was spending a little too much time indoors playing video games, but he did have school and a basketball team to get out for.

Our eighteen-year-old cat, Sebastian, had passed away on a cold November morning, causing more grief than I was ready for, but three weeks later, we got a one-year-old cat named Nellie from a shelter. An indoor cat, she was adjusting well, running up and down stairs and chasing her toys. Looking back, life was beautifully normal — almost a 1950’s family sitcom. Then COVID happened.

My son finished eighth grade at home on Zoom. Everyone at my husband’s work office was sent home to work from there “for the duration”. My daughter went from searching for jobs online to searching for online jobs. Each child had a room to do school and jobs in — their own little islands on our Planet Pandemic.

As for me, I slept in my husband’s and my bedroom, and hung out in the rest of the house. My tutoring job had stalled, of course, at least for the first few months of the pandemic. What was that thing Virginia Woolf said about a woman having “a room of one’s own”? I didn’t have that. I, like so many others, gravitated toward the kitchen to rediscover the joys of baking. I even baked birthday cakes for extended family members whom we could only “visit” on Zoom. They were impressed, though they could not eat the cake.

Those first few months of pandemic were, I’m guessing, like those who experienced World War Two from “the home front” — a kind of emergency excitement. Were we up to the task? We would make the best of this bizarre situation, damnit! Everyone we knew was isolated. We waved out windows at one another. We agreed through Facebook messages to put rainbows and teddy bears in our windows to cheer up the kids in the neighborhood.

Our family became creative problem solvers like never before! The paper product shortage, combined with our fear of supermarket shopping (no masks yet), led to our discovering many home delivery options! Oh, how well I remember the excitement we felt when we saw the bright yellow W.B. Mason truck arrive at our door with paper towels and coffee and snacks that normally fill office break rooms! We also found a dairy that normally delivers milk to schools to deliver our milk, orange juice, cottage cheese and yogurt. What a throwback! They helped us while we helped them.

As we know, life opened up a bit in the summer of 2020. My family all had masks for going out, and I started doing my tutoring job on Zoom almost daily. My son’s eighth grade graduation ceremony was cancelled, but he did get nifty balloons with a gift basket from the school.

This front porch railing that held the graduation balloons would, four months later, hold a “chute” made from two poster tubes, through which we threw Halloween candy down to Trick or Treaters. We handled the candy with tongs in gloved hands. It was still 2020.

2021 was a year of transition in New Jersey. We opted for our son to begin high school as a “hybrid student”, going to school with a mask on half the time and on Zoom the other half. However, at least two of those school months became solely homeschool as spikes in cases happened. Our daughter found a good online job and stayed in her bedroom for nearly a year before she finally moved into an apartment with friends. I gradually went back to in-person tutoring but still had a lot of work on Zoom. My husband has never stopped working from home. It’s just easier and the basement is roomy.

And the whole time, I was falling in love…with our house! I appreciated the skylight in our living room like never before, letting in beautiful sun rays, alternating with intriguing views of tree branches, birds, and falling rain and snow.

But what I fell for more than any other aspect of my abode was THE DECK! It was an afterthought when we began renting the house. It was OK when the weather was warm to sit out there and read or write sometimes. It was cool to entertain a guest or two out there, as we had a plastic table and chairs. However, with the pandemic, that deck became my family’s lifeline in so many ways. If our house was our planet, its deck was our Saturn's ring.

The deck was the only “room” of our house where my son could get some fresh air and sunshine for the first few months of the pandemic. My family discovered the joys of eating lunch and dinner out there. My daughter and I played board games, or just sat out there listening to music from her phone or podcasts from mine.

I think I treasured the deck more than anyone else in my family, as it became, finally, a room of my own. I often went out there to escape family shouting matches, or the loneliness of everyone being busier than I was. I communed with trees, birds, and squirrels I never really looked at before April, 2020. Like Dorothy’s friend Scarecrow in The Wizard of OZ, I think I’ll miss the deck most of all.

In March 2021, we began packing our belongings to move to an apartment, the best we could do on short notice to keep my son in the same high school. It is inside an apartment building. It's brand new. It's bright with lots of big windows. It's a nice apartment, but it's not Planet Pandemic. Now I know, at least a little bit, what astronauts felt like when they returned from the moon.

It’s great to be out and about, living a mostly normal life again. But knowing I’ll never return to our little Planet Pandemic is is like a cold, dark void. As my daughter said, “We trauma bonded to that house,” which is why it's so much more than a house to me. It was our family’s mother planet, and when we moved out of it, it became a mother we cannot visit or call when future times get tough.

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This story was originally published on Medium.com.