Kayla Sivesind, a wiser-than-her-years 9-year-old at the time, had seen it coming. There were the sloppy joes suddenly being made with tofu. And the Tofu Pups, some sort of health food trying to pass itself off as a hotdog. And then there were all the new breads her mom was slicing up for breakfast, lunch and dinner – all made with stuff that was hard to chew, harder still to swallow.
All this because her mom’s best friend was big – no, huge – into all-organic-all-the-time. And it was starting to rub off on Kayla’s mom.
So, on that Friday night last October, when Kayla’s mom told the kids – Kayla, her brother, Blake, then 7, and little Cassy, 3 – that they had a surprise and were going out to dinner to talk about it, Kayla, whose big brown eyes grow bigger behind her glasses when she’s straining to think, started putting two and two together.
The whole way there in the van, Kayla and Blake peppered their mom and dad with the single pressing question: “What’s the surprise? What’s the surprise?”
And their mom, Connie, and their dad, Don, just kept telling them to wait until they got to the restaurant and ordered their food. So they did. They slid into the corner booth at Applebee’s in West Des Moines, and they ordered what they always do: chicken fingers with honey mustard and root beer; hot dog, fries and a Sprite for Cassy.
Then Connie, fingering her straw, looked at her children and said:
“Now, we have something we want to tell you. And we’re not sure you’re going to be real excited at first. That’s why we’re here, so we can talk about it, and we’ll always be here to help you work it through.”
At this, Kayla, suddenly connecting the dots, threw her hands to her head, dropped her head to the table and moaned: “Oh, my goodness, we’re going to become vegetarians!”
“Nooo,” said Connie and Don together, once they’d stifled their laughs. “We’re not becoming vegetarians. We’re moving. To Chicago. Daddy’s got a new job.”
Kayla dissolved into tears on her mother’s shoulder. Finally, after minutes of muffled sobs, she looked up and bargained: “If we become vegetarians, can we not have to move?”
Alas, it is five months since that deal went unstruck, and the Sivesinds are back to eating sloppy joes with ground beef, and plenty of it, and instead of waking up in a room she and her mom painted the color of lilacs in a Des Moines suburb called Clive, Kayla is waking up in a room aswirl in lime and mint and the back yard out the window is in Crystal Lake, 50 miles northwest of downtown Chicago.
And Kayla is desperately trying to find a friend like Tia, her best friend and locker partner back in Iowa who can’t bear to look in the locker mirror anymore because Kayla’s name is still there. Or Jessi, her other best friend from around the corner, who for days wouldn’t let her mom drive by the butter yellow house with the green shutters on Hawthorn Drive once the Sivesinds moved out.
It upends everything, this picking up and replanting whole lives, this phenomenon of a transient America that, at the back of many a garage, boasts a muddy real estate sign. A house just sold. A house just bought. Another family on the move.
Oh, sure, it’s a fact of life rife with headaches and reams of things-to-do: Cancel utilities. Figure out who to call to hook ’em up on the other end. Take briquettes out of grill. Run lawn mower ’til empty. FedEx certified birth certificate to new school district; they won’t accept photocopy already in files.
But what it means in the human equation is this: a toddler who climbs in bed with her mama every night because she’s afraid without daddy in the house. A 2nd-grade boy whose best friend is found sobbing in the dark on the bathroom floor the night before the moving van takes away his Nintendo buddy. Strained silence in the new house, where all day long things have been leaking or falling apart. When the man who spurred the move gets home from work, his wife is not in the mood to detail the horror — or say much else, for that matter.
A restless nation
It is the story of roots and rootlessness in a restless nation, a nation built by immigrants who tore themselves from their homelands to set sail for a better life. Once here, promise always hid just beyond the horizon, so the wagons kept rolling west. It is an old, old story, but one with a new twist: With an economy that has moving companies cranking at an all-time high, we are more and more a nation of newcomers, even strangers, and that takes its toll on our every social fiber.
It has always been a delicate balance, the tradeoff of a better life, a bigger job, paid for in human heartache. It is a dynamic that at once strengthens family ties and frays them. Even now, in the 21st Century, it divides the women and the men, one taking the job, the other getting them there. And the women, as ever, it draws them together — a mother dropping everything to be there, a best friend knowing without words what’s needed to get through.
It’s a drama that plays and replays across America, again and again in some families, families like the Sivesinds (pronounced SEE-vi-sin), who are on their fifth house in 10 years.
As Connie Sivesind said late on the night of her going-away party in Des Moines, “With the world the way it is now, with corporate buyouts right and left, it’s not like the way it was with my dad, when you retired with the company.”
Indeed. You can walk in the Sivesinds’ basement, take one quick look at the destinations scrawled on the moving boxes stacked under the stairs, and retrace their family geography: Lawrence, Kan.; Kansas City, Dallas, Des Moines and now Chicago.
Deep into a glass of Spanish red wine after she’d spent a depressing day not long before Christmas dragging herself through houses half the size of the one she was leaving in Des Moines, Connie Sivesind looked across the table at her husband and laid it on the line: “Honey, if you don’t stop moving us, I’m just gonna buy us a mobile home and not go through all this home-buying agony anymore.”
She jests. He hopes.
Meet the Sivesinds
Connie, 39, is not new to moving. Her dad was once a farmer, but he left the fields to work for a farm co-op, running fertilizer plants across the Great Plains. She bounced around plenty as a kid. Born in Minnesota, transplanted to North Dakota, started high school in Montana, then got hauled back to Minnesota, where she tried to hop trains to make it back to the Big Sky.
She was working in Fergus Falls, Minn., as a manager for a telemarketing firm, when a guy from Topeka, Kan., a guy who worked for Sprint, the phone company her firm was making calls for, came to town in December 1988 to learn the ropes of his new job.
The next time he came to town, they headed up to Fargo, N.D., the big city an hour away, for dinner and drinks. They’ve been together ever since.
Don, 38, a spit-polished salesman through and through, stayed in the same school district from 4th grade through the end of high school. Moving, for a kid who’d only migrated from one side of Topeka to the other, sounded like a big adventure. So when Sprint gave him a chance to move from Kansas City, where he had lived for 12 years, to Dallas or Denver, he jumped. Because Connie had once lived in Denver, they signed on for Dallas.
They were there two years; Don was traveling four to five days a week the whole time. So he took a job in Des Moines that, when the company got bought out, turned out not to be what he’d hoped. After 2 1/2 years there, he got the offer for a job at Verio, a Denver-based Internet service provider, with offices in the Civic Opera Building in Chicago. Don is now director of sales for that office.
And here’s who he and Connie have been towing around the country: Kayla, who turned 10 in January, is the kind of kid who, though in gifted programs, made friends with a special-ed kid who had his own teacher’s aide in their classroom. She took the time to get to know him, and found out he made up the best games at recess. Blake, a tenderheart, his mother calls him, is the kid most of the boys and plenty of the girls in his 2nd-grade Iowa class claimed as their best friend. Cassy, the baby, is the one who prompts Connie to quip: “I must have drunk vinegar the night you were born, because you’re just spittin’ vinegar.”
And then there’s Sadie, the yellow lab Connie and the kids rescued from a Des Moines animal pound two May Days ago. When they called Don to say they were bringing home something big for his May basket, he thought he was getting a big screen TV.
A move in progress
The Tuesday night after the non-vegetarian dinner at Applebee’s, Don flew with Connie to Chicago to begin what they’re banking on will be the last stop in their hopscotch around the country. They checked into the Comfort Inn O’Hare that would be Don’s Monday-through-Friday home, flying back to Des Moines for weekends that seemed to grow shorter as the calendar pages turned. Connie came to check things out.
First order of business: Find a house, sell a house.
The second part of that equation came slowly, the selling of the four-bedroom, two-story they built in 1997, a house Connie grew to love.
“It takes a while for a house to put its arms around you, and it’s done that now,” she said back before Christmas, when her house near Des Moines was all lit up for the holidays. “Our agent told us if it didn’t sell by Thanksgiving, we’d probably have to wait ’til spring.”
Thanksgiving came and went and Connie was still scampering behind the kids, picking up every little thing they put down, making sure the place stayed immaculate should the phone ever ring with a buyer on the line.
Finally, nearly two weeks before Christmas, a pair of empty-nesters from Ohio bought the house for $202,500, a substantial sum in Des Moines where last year the average sale price for a home was $120,796. But try finding 2,350 square feet, in a nice neighborhood, with a big back yard, for 200 grand in Chicago, or even Schaumburg.
They might as well have picked up a Chicagoland map, drawn a big fat circle from Lake Michigan to beyond O’Hare, snipped out that part of the pickings, and confined themselves to what was left: The Land Near the End of the Line. Out where folks on the trains take to wearing wristwatches with alarms so they don’t sleep through their stop, a full hour-plus after climbing aboard.
The hunt for home
And that is how, the week before Christmas, Connie Sivesind found herself not home baking kringla or krumkaake, recipes passed down from farm to farm, but instead driving around in a dollar-green Infiniti with the plates “PIC VIC,” as in Vicki MacKinnon, the No. 2 agent in Coldwell Banker’s Arlington Heights office.
MacKinnon picked her up at O’Hare just after noon that Wednesday, tore through 10 houses by dinnertime, and was back at it, with 16 more listings in the pile, first thing Thursday morning.
Thank heaven way back in October when the Sivesinds realized they were, gulp, getting out the moving boxes again, Connie could put in a call to her mother, Lois Thomas, 76, now a widow in Fargo, N.D., whose Tuesdays are saved for Bible study, her Thursdays kept for quilting.
“When do you need the help?” was the first thing her mother asked.
And when Connie replied, “I don’t want to break up your life,” her mother answered: “You and your family are my life. I’ll stay as long as you need me.”
She was there three days after the Applebee’s dinner. She wouldn’t leave for five months, not until they’d made the move, and she’d sewn the curtains for the kitchen, the living and the dining rooms.
“She’s my earthly angel,” says Connie. “My father’s passed away, so she comes and fills my children’s life with joy.”
She filled the cookie tins for Christmas. And went to the pre-school Christmas pageant when Connie had to hunt for houses in Chicago. She put supper on the table every night. And on the really bad days, when Connie thought she was truly on the edge, her mother was there to patch her back together and mop the kitchen floor besides.
That Thursday, out cruising with MacKinnon, deep in the heart of the Fox River Valley, in South Elgin and Lake-in-the-Hills and Algonquin and Crystal Lake, out where roads are getting widened and super-sized street lamps are being raised, Connie crossed house after house off her list: Kitchen table would never fit in one; another had a tiny back yard and bad carpeting to boot; one had a busy road right behind the stockade fence and Connie could just picture some car crashing through; two places under construction weren’t bad but Connie wondered how long it’d be before other families with kids moved into the still-being-built subdivision, and she bemoaned living in a mud puddle until spring when they could put down sod.
Could this be the one?
Finally, just after Don called on his cell phone to say he’d cleared his desk and was driving out to catch up with them, they walked into a cinnamon-scented, cream-colored neo-Victorian in Crystal Lake where the brochure at the door shouted “Great Neighborhood!! Shows Like A Model!!”
Don said it first: “I like this.” Then, pointing to a corner in the family room with French doors, he mused: “That’s where the chaise lounge goes.” And then, in the kitchen: “Honey, would our table fit here?”
And only then, finally, did Connie show her card: “Nice house. I’m not cryin’. Not yet…” Later, walking through the big back yard with the bird feeder hanging from the ash tree, she pronounced: “It’s my favorite so far.”
And by 9:38 the next night, not even 2 1/2 days after Connie swept into town, it was theirs, a bidding war with another buyer costing them one migraine and the full $237,500 the seller was asking for.
Back in Des Moines, counting the days ’til Christmas, Connie dashed through her to-do’s: got bids from movers, made reservations for Kayla’s and Blake’s birthday parties the Saturday after New Year’s, found a family through church who could use her washer and dryer, remembered to take oysters out of the freezer for Christmas Eve’s oyster stew.
Although it was no picnic for Don living out of a motel, shuffling back and forth on weekends and breaking into a new job in a company with growing pains all its own, he was the first to admit that 99 percent of the move was on Connie’s shoulders. And she just forged right on, stoking herself with Extra Strength Tylenol and Diet Cokes.
Put it on the calendar
The big move now had a date: Jan. 17, one month to the day after they’d made their bid on the Crystal Lake house. None too soon for a family tired of living in two ZIP codes.
Long ago they’d wearied of the Monday morning ritual of Connie taking Don to the airport in the dark and coming home to find little Cassy slumped by the fireplace asking, “Where’s my Daddy?” She couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t in his bed. And every time the phone rang, Cassy tugged on Connie’s leg, asking, “Daddy? Can I talk to Daddy?” She was sure every call could connect her to her missing Papa.
It didn’t get much easier when Cassy watched her swingset being dismantled the week after New Year’s, and laid in the garage to wait for the movers. And it wasn’t getting any easier on Kayla, who still remembered what it was like to wake up every morning after they moved to Des Moines from Dallas and cry because she missed her best friend Ashley.
Blake, though, was thinking this move to Chicago might have its advantages. After all, Chicago was full of big things, he said, “big movie stars and all that.” And another thing: the limousines. When they came to Chicago for Thanksgiving (sort of a warm-up for the move), Blake and Kayla kept a limo count, and by the time they left, they’d tallied 176 of the extra-long cars.
And Connie, well, her best friend, Ann Williams, the one who foisted all the tofu recipes on the Sivesinds, the one who looked for all the world like she could be Connie’s sister, what with both of them sporting hair in nearly matching shades of titian red, she was in tears every time she thought about Connie leaving. And since they were used to talking, what, 8 or 10 times a day (“Check out Oprah, gotta go.” Fifteen minutes later: “What’d you think of that?”), and because every time she stood at her kitchen sink she stared out at Connie’s side yard, well, it was plenty damp in the waning days on Hawthorn Drive.
Connie, though, couldn’t cry. “I can’t go there yet,” she said before her Yuletide house hunt. “I have to get my kids through this. I have to get us there in one piece, I can’t fall apart. I’ll probably get to Chicago, pour myself a glass of wine, go sit on the back porch and have myself a good cry.”
Champagne and tears
But on the first Friday in January, the day after a water pipe sprung a leak that turned her driveway into an ice floe and threw her into a panic that the whole house sale would fall apart, she sat down at Williams’ kitchen table, sipped a cafe latte made with soy milk, and finally grabbed a box of tissues.
“You find so few people, like in our neighborhood, who you can call and say, `I need a roll of toilet paper and I don’t feel like going to the store,’ or, `I need an onion,’ or she’ll come down in her slippers, or we’ll put the kids to bed and one of us will come down and have a glass of wine. One day she wanted me to measure her for a swimsuit. She was like, `Never mind the fat, just measure me.’
“I know a lot of women who are afraid to give their heart to somebody because they know they’re gonna be transferred, or they’re afraid that if they get close, they’ll just have to pull away. But life’s too short, or I’m getting too old, to not enjoy life’s journey,” said Connie.
“We just have the same pulse. We share a heart. She has one side, I have the other.”
And then, one achingly short week later, the brigade of packers pulled into the Sivesinds’ driveway. They were there to tuck the contents of five lives, and don’t forget the dog, into corrugated cardboard boxes.
Williams brought over lunch: organic egg salad on whole wheat pita, champagne to wash it down. They dined atop moving boxes, sipped from plastic Pooh Bear cups. They tried to pretend it was just another Friday afternoon.
Goodbye, Iowa
But Monday morning the big orange Allied moving van turned west on Hawthorn and rolled to a stop in front of the butter yellow house where the lights had been burning since shortly before 6 a.m. The kids went to school that day. And by 2 o’clock when it was time to pick them up, everything but Blake’s bunk beds, Don and Connie’s waterbed and the 90-pound potted palm had been squeezed onto the truck in a game the movers likened to a “giant jigsaw puzzle.”
Connie sighed, “Ah, the worst part of the day,” and climbed in the mini-van alongside Don for the drive to the two schools, first Blake’s, where even the teacher’s eyes turned red, and she had to turn away, and then onto Kayla’s, where her teacher handed her a box of homemade peanut butter fudge bars for the long drive ahead.
“Why do you have to leave?” wailed Kayla’s friend Jessi Carlson, who only two years before Kayla had clung to when she was a brand new 2nd grader and terrified of walking through the lunch line alone.
Don steered them home, dabbing at his tears. “See, I told you it’s not easy driving and crying,” said Connie, sounding more than a little practiced.
Back on Hawthorn, the doors of the moving van were shut. The driver double-checked the Crystal Lake address, and headed off into the freezing drizzle of the darkening Iowa twilight.
Ann Williams, like an amoeba taking in a cell, wrapped her arms around Cassy, then Blake, then Kayla. Don unplugged the phone. And Connie’s mother stood alone in the kitchen, whispering one last blessing on the house she deemed “a very fine home.” Then the door was locked.
“All right,” said Connie, climbing behind the wheel of the van that, by nightfall, would carry them to the Quad Cities, at the Iowa-Illinois line. She sighed a long sigh, and stared into the drizzle starting to stick to her windshield.
“I’m thinking this is too hard to do too many times in your life,” she said to no one in particular.
“It’s already too many. Let’s go back,” said Kayla.
“And it doesn’t get any easier,” said Connie’s mother, who has moved nine times in the 45 years since she married.
Hello, Crystal Lake
Later, after the three-hour drive in the single plowed lane on Interstate 80, Connie declared it “a terrible trip. It was sheer ice one foot away on both sides. My heart cried half the trip.” Cassy kept asking to go back home. Sadie, the lab who can’t leave Connie alone, kept leaping to the front.
That night, as had been the case for the last 3 1/2 months, Connie didn’t sleep much. She was worrying about the bank wiring money in time for the closing. She wondered if the kids would like the house. She missed Ann; heck, she called her from the motel to ask, kidding, “Do you have any extra toilet paper?”
And then it was morning. The house in Crystal Lake, the one that sort of reminded her of the house she’d just left in Des Moines, it was sitting empty now, waiting for the Sivesinds to make it theirs.
When they unlocked the door, Kayla was the first to burst in. “It’s too small,” she declared, after making the rounds upstairs and down. Connie’s heart twisted a little. Blake, though, found a cool place for hide and seek under the basement stairs. Cassy wandered around, saying it was time to go home, to go see Kate, her very best 3-year-old friend.
The moving van wouldn’t be there until the next day, but they pulled lawn chairs out of Don’s car and made do. Don, in fact, was up until midnight at his laptop, finishing a presentation and making copies at Kinko’s. He had an 8:45 flight to Kansas City the next morning; his boss had scheduled a regional meeting that he couldn’t get out of. Connie would have to handle the move-in all on her own.
And, except for the two couches and the entertainment center that wouldn’t fit down the basement steps, and the refrigerator that made it by a mere quarter-inch into the space where it had to go, it wasn’t too harrowing.
But Bob Guziak, one of the movers with a bloody dagger tatooed on his forearm, put it bluntly: “Like I said, moving and divorce is the two most stressful things in your life.”
What threw Connie and her mom the most, though, was that after they’d mopped floors and filled in nail holes and even swept out the garage in the house they left in Des Moines, this one was, well, not quite Spic ‘n’ Span. One wall alone had 36 nails that hadn’t been yanked.
At last, a friendly face
And then there were the neighbors. No one came that first day. Or the rest of the week. But then, finally, on Saturday morning when Don was out shoveling the drive, someone pulled up in a van. Don looked inside and saw a little girl about Cassy’s age and a boy just about Blake’s. The woman driving the van introduced herself, Tammy Walker, and said she was off to the Pinewood Derby for the day, but they’d be back.
That night near bedtime the doorbell rang. It was Tammy’s husband, Will. He had a foil-covered plate in his hands. There was a note taped to the mound of chocolate chip-M&M-oatmeal cookies: “Welcome from the Walkers!” They listed the names and ages of their four kids, jotted their phone number, scrawled: “Call if you need anything!”
Still, Kayla and Blake started school the following Monday not knowing anyone. Because the schools in Crystal Lake are so crowded these days, they couldn’t go to the school just around the corner. Instead, they walk to that school to catch a shuttle to theirs on the other side of town.
But that first Monday morning, Don long gone on the 4:30 a.m. train to catch up with the 247 e-mails awaiting him after a week out of the office, Connie drove her older two to South Elementary School. They checked in at the principal’s office, and while they waited for Blake’s teacher, two 4th-grade girls came up to Kayla and asked, “Are you Kayla?” They’d heard she was coming. And with those three words, she was no longer an anonymous new kid in school.
Blake’s 2nd-grade teacher, Aimee Day, said everyone in class would be wearing a nametag so he could get to know their names. Kayla’s 4th-grade teacher, Laura Rukujzo, who had called and left a message the day before saying they couldn’t wait to meet her, bounded down the hall and wrapped Kayla in a hug. She picked a buddy to help her through the maze of the first day, and she’d left a note and a smiley pencil on her new desk.
It wasn’t long before Connie started hearing certain names over and over again. Kristin, in Kayla’s class, reminded her of her beloved Tia. Blake met a boy named Tyler or Trevor or Taylor who gave him the 2nd-grade equivalent of gold, a Pokemon character tucked inside a shiny ball, something called a Poke Ball.
But still, two weeks after starting school, Kayla wrote in her journal: “Today I felt bad. I miss all my friends. I haven’t seen them in two weeks, and I might not ever see them again.” One Friday after school she wanted to call her new friend Kristin to play, but she didn’t know her last name, and there were two Kristins on the class list so she didn’t know which one to call. She could barely eat that night, and she went straight to her room after dinner.
Anyone know a plumber?
Connie wasn’t faring much better. She was getting to know the clerks at Home Depot by name. She’d run back and forth five times in a couple days trying to get lights for the ceiling fans so that once it got dark out the kids didn’t have to play in the closets or the bathroom, the only places upstairs with lights. She finally dug up an electrician from the Yellow Pages to come to her rescue.
Then she found a plumber for the leak under the kitchen sink and the toilet that wouldn’t stop. And after only two weeks the washing machine up and died in the middle of a load. She was making friends aplenty with fix-it folk and delivery crews.
Other than that, Connie, who back in Iowa was the one who got the carpool going and corralled the neighbors for girls-night-out, hadn’t met anyone. She’d talked to Tammy Walker on the phone, but not in person. She was so busy tackling the house, though, that she didn’t really mind.
But then Tammy called again — first to invite Blake to play, then to stay for dinner. She called right back and asked the girls to come later for popcorn and “Tarzan,” the video. Connie walked them over, kitty-corner across the street, and ended up staying for two hours.
Three weeks after the day the big orange moving van had parked itself out front, Connie, looking smart in the black Spandex pants and cropped fleece jacket she wore the day she found the house, headed out to a coffee at Tammy’s to meet some neighbors. Four mini-vans were parked out front as Connie and Cassy made it up the drive. Just inside, a mom clutching a baby monitor was shaking off the cold.
In the kitchen, a gooey coffeecake — all cream cheese, cherry-pie filling and refrigerator crescent rolls — was coming out of the oven. Coffee was poured all around, and the women dove into conversations that unfold wherever there are mothers of young children: C-sections; the bliss of 45 minutes to yourself at a Body Pump class; bonding with another mother in the crying room at church, both covered in spit-up.
“Truly, any time I’m making anything, I could call up any one of my neighbors, say, `I’m halfway through making M&M cookies, and I don’t have an egg.’ And in the dead of winter I could send my kid across the street to get one,” said Tammy, making it sound like this new neighborhood might not be so unlike the one Connie left 338 miles behind.
Planting roots
Walking home that morning, after all the sleepless nights, and all the detailed lists, and all the wrenching goodbyes, Connie had a flicker of a notion: “I sense we’re going to love it here.”
There’s only one thing she’s itching to do right now, to make her know she’s home at last. In her basement she has a mesh bag of 100 gladiola bulbs, once tended by her farmer father, that she has planted and dug out of every garden she has ever called her own. She can’t wait until the last of the snows are melted, and she can dig in her McHenry County dirt.
Soon as she can, she’ll plant the glads in bunches every two weeks. That way, all through the summer, she’ll look out her kitchen window and see the reds and peaches and yellows and pinks that have told her she’s home ever since she was her daddy’s little girl, way, way back in Minnesota, some five long gardens ago.
At least until the day Don walks in and says, “Honey, there’s this job in . . . .”
