Moving house and the weight that it carries

It's the memories we have made, the people we have known, and the times we are leaving behind.

- Li Xueying

Somewhere along the East Coast Park stretch, there is a tree branch "planted" into the sand. It was a Covid-19 project. During the pandemic years, my family would sometimes cycle to the beach near our home in the evenings and make a quick picnic out of dinner.

On one of those excursions, my daughters - then three and six - delighted in finding a snapped-off branch with leaves still attached to it. They dug a little hole in the sand, stuck the branch in it, and carefully doused it with water from their drinking bottles.

In the intervening years, we'd search for "our plant" when in the vicinity. "There it is," the girls would sometimes say when they glimpsed a sapling, imagining that the branch had grown.

Later on, as they got older and busier, and my time got more compressed, we did not look for the plant as often any more, but it still looms large in our collective memories - a moment of no significance to others, but evocative of a certain time and place for us.

At the end of 2024, my family will be moving out of our home in Siglap, where we have been living for eight years and which is pretty much the only home that the girls, now six and nine, have known. We will be shifting almost halfway across the island to be closer to their school, so we are leaving not just the apartment but the entire neighbourhood and community.

When my husband and I decided on the move earlier this year, we quickly and decisively set things in motion, recognising the good sense that drove it.

Yet, in the months since, I have also found myself at times unexpectedly bowed by emotion at the prospect. At dinner with a good friend and current neighbour one night, I found myself tearing up in the restaurant as I spoke about the impending move.

What was I grieving for?

THE MUSIC IN THE COMMUNITY

At work and even at home, much of my attention is turned outwards.