a moving experience

Robin exaggerates both her own disarray and my coolness. I think we are friends because underneath we are so similar; in our sense of humor and way of looking at the world and love of literature and art. Except that Robin is much, much smarter. She has to be to hold all this stuff together. And a better person. Unselfish to a fault, where I am the opposite.
But this not what I set out to write about. Yes, my move is far easier than Robin's. My company is paying to move us; it paid for a broker to help us find an apartment in New York (Note to people thinking it might be fun to move to New York: A renter looking for an apartment typically pays a feeof 12 percent to 15 percent of the first YEAR'S rent to the broker. And since monthly rent for even a tiny apartment in Manhattan is in the $1700 to $2000 range, that's a whole lot of money. And don't even get me started on all the documents you have to produce to prove you are fiscally OK... It was easier to buy a house in Raleigh.) But moving is not painless, however you do it. I feel as if my life is being upended, ripped down to the foundations, and everything I believed about myself being called into question.
I have lived in North Carolina(Raleigh and Chapel Hill) for 14 years, all the time grumbling about the boring architecture and lack of cultural life and the humidity and the blandness and the shopping malls. I went to school in New York and left because I could not figure out a way not to be desperately poor there. I always told myself that New York was my real home and that if I could ever figure out a way to earn a decent living there, I would move back at once. Now it has happened, and I am looking around in disbelief. Must I really leave all this beauty? My beautiful 1920s stone cottage, where we have been so happy? The yard where my dog loves to hang out? The redbud is out; I will not see redbud again, we don't have it up north. Nor azealas, magnolia, wisteria. Oh, god, wisteria. Am I really crying for wisteria? Is this what it comes down to? Or is it only the symbol of something else, of not appreciating what you have until it is already disappearing?