Interim Placement (or, Why Most of You Haven’t Heard from Me in Five Weeks)

It’s the evening of July 6, 2009 as I write overlooking the lake at Black Hawk State Park in Lake View, Iowa. Thirty minutes until sunset, the still water, and the wooded campground; I feel like “a writer” and not just some tech-crazed city girl glued to a laptop and nursing a Diet Mountain Dew. The tranquility of this familiar place makes the last five weeks of chaos melt away from my memory…well, almost.

Moving from southern California to northwest Iowa is undoubtedly the biggest change Josh and I have ever experienced. The idea came about slowly sometime in the late fall, then grew and snowballed until I accepted a job in Iowa in early April while camping at this very site. By May 18^th, we were making an offer on an acreage outside of Odebolt – which was accepted at $60,000. The prospect of owning a HOUSE, not a condo, at this very non-Californian price was (and still is) exciting and shocking. What would we do with 6.46 acres of beautiful space, two giant barns, a corn crib, a chicken house, and a hog barn? Whatever the &*@% we wanted!

Around that time, I began to panic about the tasks ahead of me. I was working two jobs and Josh was working as well as doing some small jobs in his shop after hours. We needed to pack and move both the condo and the shop, as well as fix up the condo for someone else to live there. The most daunting task to me was finding a renter for our condo in Orange. United Bank of Iowa was putting pressure on me to produce a signed lease before they would qualify me for a measly $60K because to them my current “large” mortgage could only be for a mansion. Josh was convinced that given the current housing market we would not be able to get the money we needed for our place, thus ruining our master plan. Selling was not an option, as I owed double the current value. When my partner-in-crime Kathryn jokingly recommended “jingle mail” (what she defined as just sending the keys to Wells Fargo), I started to consider foreclosure but needed my perfect credit to buy the new place. After spreading the word and trying to find someone I knew remotely to rent, like a friend of a friend or even an acquaintance of a coworker, the time came to seek out a total stranger. Terrifying. I would surely end up with a loser who didn’t pay rent or trashed the place we had worked so hard to remodel.

Within an hour of Josh posting our place on Craigslist, I had a single email from a man who actually knew how to spell and use punctuation correctly, a rare jewel in my Craigslist experience! That afternoon he came over, filled out an application, signed a lease, and wrote me a check. After all the anxiety, it was easy! The only catch was we had about ten days to move out, fix up the place, and clean because he wanted to move in by the end of the month. There were some very late nights and even a J-day from my job involved, but in literally the eleventh hour we were done (let me take this opportunity to thank my husband for some serious hustle and hard work). My renter even emailed that he appreciated my “punctiliousness,” and after looking that up in the dictionary I knew he was a model tenant (and I was apparently an open book).

In the wonderful world of special education, we have what is called a 30 day interim placement. That happens when a student with an Individualized Educational Plan moves from one district to another and the receiving district has 30 days to revise the IEP recommendations. Josh, Mikeee (the one-eyed dog), and I were incredibly lucky to have a friend like Kathy who welcomed us into her home as our interim placement. We moved to her house in Silverado and experienced Canyon life first-hand. From a crazy note from an anonymous neighbor to a fifteen-hour power outage, it was an adventure. I even had to off road through a stranger’s property in complete darkness, which is a great story to me but Josh and Kathy thought it “wasn’t that bad” so I won’t share. We had some of the best dinners with our new family, and though we weren’t home much it was certainly our home.

The last few weeks in California were packed with lunches, dinners, and parties – completely flattering, yet completely non-stop movement. For our last weekend in California we camped at O’Neill Regional Park and enjoyed goodbye visits from friends and family. I had a good laugh when Dan and Amy’s son turned the camper shower on himself accidentally. I had a good cry when I watched my parents drive away with my aunt and uncle after our last dinner for a long time.

On Monday, June 29th we loaded 22 tightly-wrapped pallets of our belongings and Josh’s shop into a 53’ semi heading to Iowa. Sweaty and tired, I still felt proud that I learned to operate the pallet jack (and hey, what was that I felt – triceps?). The driver even helped us load, and though he wasn’t doing it the way we would have, we were thankful nonetheless. Josh tipped him to ensure that he wouldn’t arrive early or run off with everything we owned. Although we were in constant motion for over a month and I felt sleep-deprived the entire time, things were coming easily and going smoothly. If that weren’t karmicly-beautiful enough, we traveled from California to Iowa in record time with gorgeous weather and no traffic to speak of. We arrived in Iowa and were able to camp on our future property. The sellers were incredibly nice people (and young, yeah!) who made us feel at home and would become our first friends here. Everything was going great…until, it wasn’t.

Copyright Rachel Burns 2009