The reason I've been absent from posting is that we finally (finally!) sold our house (
photo above). After debating it for years, making all the necessary improvements, listing it, staging it, and all the rest, it sold.
Tonight, some neighbors are throwing us a goodbye party.
Parting is such sweet sorrow. For five years, we've lived in this home, our lives becoming increasingly intertwined with the lives of these people whom we would not know were it not for our common location.
Often over the last five years we have lamented that our diverse neighborhood could not serve as some kind of model for the United Nations -- Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Protestant, atheist, from every continent on the globe ... raising our children together, celebrating together, mourning together, rearing children together, praying for each other, helping each other. There have been conflicts, and resolution. We have successfully coexisted ... I think of that bumper sticker with the word "coexist" made of the symbols of every major faith.
It's not perfect. Nothing ever is. Sometimes feelings are hurt, people offended. Humans judge one another, it's what we do. So much easier to point out the speck in your neighbor's eye than to fish out the plank in your own. We're packed in here like sardines in this suburban development of townhomes, and sometimes it's just too much. Competition. Claustrophobia. Lack of privacy. Noise - both audible and mental.
But we've enjoyed it here. We will miss our friends, their front stoops, the tree in our yard where the kids took cover from the afternoon sun, the comfort of knowing someone would ALWAYS be there to listen or lend a hand.
And our home. How we'll miss our home. I think of walking out the door next week, locking the keys inside and never coming back, and I feel hollow.
I walk into our kitchen to grab a snack or get another box to pack, and I see myself, four years younger and hugely pregnant with our first baby, down on my knees pulling staples out of the plywood subfloor. Who remodels their kitchen with a baby due in two weeks? We did. And he came a week ahead of schedule (first babies are NEVER early, everyone said to us -- they were wrong), leaving us without a kitchen for his first few weeks of life. While I laid upstairs nursing, eating take-out and recovering from my C-section, my husband used his family leave time to lay a tile floor, hang cabinets and install appliances and countertops. It turned out beautifully. And now it all belongs to someone else.
I walk into our master bathroom and again, see myself hugely pregnant -- this time well into labor, lying on the floor, groaning and wondering if now would be a good time to leave for the hospital.
In our bedroom I think of the love we've shared, life-giving love. Late night talks, tender touches and other things I will not mention here. In the boys' rooms I recall bedtime stories and lying with them at naptime, stroking their little heads and singing made-up lullabies as they drifted off to sleep.
I look at our floors, our paint colors, our lighting, all lovingly selected after much research and thought. It's a beautiful home. We made it that way. And I'll miss it a lot.
I must sound like I'm unhappy with our decision to move. Not at all. I'll soon post pictures of our new home, which is a dream come true, our diamond in the not-so-rough. A 1921 Arts and Crafts farmhouse on four acres in the country west and south of here, in good shape but in desperate need of updating.
What fun it will be to restore this gorgeous home to its previous glory -- in fact, to a glory it never dreamed of! What joy I will have watching my two boys run unfettered through the gorgeous pines that dot our property! They can be as loud and crazy as they want and no one will look on disapprovingly or whisper about our lax parenting. Our boys are BOYS, through and through, and that's something not always celebrated in our culture. I imagine this new home as our respite from the culture -- isolated enough to give us space to think and pray and dream and plan, yet close enough to civilization that we will still be active participants.
Here it is:
I promise to post more pictures and details very soon. Pray for us as we try to move our belongings there this weekend.
