The inspector's report came back with a laundry list of things "wrong" with our house -- basement windows and hidden leaks and tree roots making their way into the water line. I was suitably dismayed.

One of my oldest and dearest friends is a freelance writer and we talked together tonight -- a last catch-up before I go. He is working on a big story now for National Geographic -- a story about pediatric hospice. After 20 minutes of me rambling on about basement windows and tree roots, etc., the words "pediatric hospice" detonated into the echoing air of our empty house.

I do not care now about basement windows and tree roots, etc. It is good to remember that none of this bullshit matters.

I do not believe that I am moving to Italy. No really. Not in my heart.

I am, at the moment, very much here -- thinking hard about the house, my house, because it has been requiring so much attention lately. And the car. And the utility bill. And the rest of the long list of things that must be done in the next five days. Italy has not seemed real for many weeks now. Or, if it has, only fleetingly, in waves.

We made a reservation at a hotel in Pietrasanta for our first few days in country, before the Rustic Farmhouse With Trusted Gardener is ready for us. The online picture of its lobby puts me in mind not of Italy, but of our very own kitchen floor here at our house, whose checkerboard tiles we installed ourselves one winter, the boys and Jonathan and I.

But then Jonathan got an email from Lorenzo at the hotel asking about our expected arrival time and for one minute, Italy seemed like it was really happening.

We were caught off-guard by the house inspectors, who surprised us by coming over without warning first thing early Wednesday morning. Despite our discomfiture at this, we were fortunate that the bed did happen to be made and that Jonathan was in fact wearing pants. This is not always the case.

We wait now to hear the report -- Jonathan nonchalantly, me with loathing in my heart for our judges. If they can't see that the beauty of the house makes all the tiny quirks (solid roofs are vastly overrated, in my opinion, and really just separate us from nature and our animal kin in a way that is surely detrimental to our very souls) that come with living in such a unique (experience the wilderness!) place worth it, then they do not deserve this house (the elements are our friends -- welcome them with open arms!)

Driving down Union Boulevard last week, we were caught in a sudden deluge when the heavens opened up and it seemed like the sky itself was, at long last, as predicted, falling. Any rain at all is an event around here and we have been known to go out and stand on our porch to stare open-mouthed at a light drizzle, but this was really an astounding downpour.

"You know," Jonathan said to me while bravely navigating between the sudden-onset lagoons that had appeared in the road, "in Italy, we will have to get used to rain." And for just one minute, Italy was real.

Update: The house sold in one day. The buyer seems very nice, as far as we can tell. A professor, a musician. He loved the house enough to outbid other buyers. I hope he is as happy here as we have always been.

The listing for our house went live this morning. I have only cried twice. Maybe three times.

Jonathan and I are now sitting outside at the Dogtooth Café while strange people judge the suitability of our Eden for their own purposes. In a while, we will go up into the mountains and stare at the sky. But for the moment, I have to be somewhere with cellphone coverage so that I can approve appointments through the appointments app. It is all hideous.

We did the last things this morning at dawn -- putting down the edging in the garden, weeding the front flower beds. Our little house is ready now, as best it can be, to make its way in the world without us.

I wonder whether all the years of joy we had in it -- all the bedtime stories and sudden delight at morning glories and cups of tea in the evenings and the hidden messages we wrote under the kitchen tile we put down and the long, slow summer afternoons when we did nothing much but we did it together -- will all of that have somehow soaked into the house so that the people who go into the house will sense it there? Will 26 years of love make itself felt? Will the ghosts of our hearts haunt the place even when we're gone? 

My new best friends the painting crew are here. I am in the only room of the house that is not being painted while they go through a thousand rolls of blue masking tape in all the other rooms.

This is the 10th stage of the process of revolutionizing our lives out of 12 stages total. I made a list.

One: The Wild Romantic Imagination Stage. I think it was cold. I think it was even snowing. Or maybe it was just another bleak winter day when Jonathan and I hatched our plan. I don't remember exactly how it came about other than that it started as an inchoate longing to go somewhere new together.

Two: The Doing Things Online Stage. This is an easy and fun stage. It is easy and fun to surf the net looking at rental properties on hillsides in Tuscany, for example. Or to search for the menus of restaurants that would be near you and decide what you would eat if you were actually there at the moment. Or to drive around on Google Street View ogling the produce outside the "Frutte e Verdure" or the bread in the window of the "Galleria del Pane". It is so easy and fun that, in an excited dither, suddenly (over the course of one full month) we had rented a rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener on an actual hillside in Tuscany.

Three: The Sorting Through Decades of Our Stuff With a Hard and Critical Eye Stage. Visit 1 out of 99 to the ARC donation station.

Four: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part One (also Crying Stage -- Part One). The tiny baby shoes! The homemade birthday cards! The little bag of extracted wisdom teeth! (Well, maybe not the teeth...)

Five: The Making Friends With Skilled Craftspeople Stage. Oh, the parade of people who actually know what they are doing (aka, not us)! Plumbers, electricians, landscapers, contractors, floor refinishers -- we have come to know and love you, been through challenges together (trucks that wouldn't start, damp, spiders, kidney stones, attack dogs) and learned each others' secrets. Our time together has been ... special.

Six: The Standing Together in the Epoxy Aisle of Home Depot Trying Very Hard to Concentrate On How Much We Actually Love Each Other Stage. Nuff said.

Seven: The Finally Packing It All Up Into Storage Stage. Followed very quickly (and inevitably) by the Oops! I Need That Again One More Time substage.

Eight: The Farewell Tour Stage. Coffee and crying with dear friends. Mostly crying. My friends are understanding and tolerant. And also -- fortunately -- waterproof.

Nine: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part Two. Is it possible to pack up and carry away with me enough objects so that I can hold on forever to those years when the boys were growing up here and I had them with me every day? No. (More crying.)

Ten: The Everything Gets Painted Beige Stage. And our life here is erased.

So that is where we are now. There are still two stages and 21 days left to go.

Eleven: The Having Strangers Sit In Judgement Of The Place That Has Been Our Eden Stage. We will try to be out of the house whenever it is being shown by the real estate agent. Obviously.

Twelve: The Walking Away Stage. Actually, driving away in a rental car that we will return at the airport while, almost certainly, crying. And then it will be a whole new world -- the dreams of a bleak winter day made real.

It has recently occurred to me that for the rest of my life, this time now will be "that last summer."

I will turn to Jonathan years from now and say, "Remember that last summer in Colorado when we stuffed ourselves with Pueblo corn because we knew it would be the last?" or "Well, Tris moved to Alaska that last summer we were in Colorado, so that would have been 2022" or "Remember that last summer when we kept getting rid of furniture so that we ate off smaller and smaller tables until finally we only had a kitchen stool in the dining room and then finally at the end we had nothing but picnics on our futon on the floor?"

The contractor has now finished the repair work in the basement. His baby was born 10 days ago, between two of his residencies here. It is a little boy -- everyone is healthy and happy and sleep-deprived, as is customary. This means that we have been working on this house so long that children have actually come into the world during the process. No word yet on whether our new little contractor will be named after me. I am sure they are probably thinking about it, though! Fingers crossed!

There is new beige carpet in the boys' old bedroom, completely changing the quality of the light in there. The house painters will be here next week and paint all the walls beige, which is apparently what home buyers these days want in a house. I find this depressing and also, as a cultural sociologist, an important clue to the general psyche of the American populace. People who would want to live in an all-beige house would absolutely elect far-right fascists to office. The cruelty is the point.

As I write, hidden away in a corner, the hardwood floor is being refinished. It was supposed to happen last week, but the head refinisher had to have some kidney stones out. It's the whole circle of life around here. 

While the finish on the floors is drying, we are not able to walk on them, which means our access to our only bathroom is cut off. For two days. We have bought an 8-foot 4x4 beam which we intend to use as a bridge between the kitchen (which we can reach through the back door) and the bathroom. At first, we thought about just trying to leap across the distance, but even with a running start and an empty bladder, the reality of inadvertently slamming into the projecting corner of the basement stairwell and crumbling into a heap on the (presumably) sticky hardwood hallway floor and being stuck there until EMTs pried me up using (again, presumably) some sort of very large crowbar was, well, off-putting.

"Remember that last summer in Colorado," Jonathan will say, "when we had to have the floors refinished twice?"