A Bittersweet Good-bye

Last week we closed on our house in town. On one hand I was happy that we weren't going to have to worry about renting it anymore (even though we had really good renters who were young gals from our church...one of them in is in our small group and she lived in Eli's bedroom so he called her "The Girl That Lives In My Room" for the longest time!) or when it was going to sell or paying two mortgages if we lost our renters. On the other hand, I was pretty sad.

This house was the first house Brad and I actually owned in our marriage. We had lived in a lovely old rent house in Lubbock (with a stainglass window depicting the address!) and it holds a special place in my heart because it's where Brad and I were first married. Then we lived in an apartment for about six months while we looked for a house here. Don't really remember much about that apartment because it's also where I spent the first trimester pregnant with Eli and when I wasn't teaching, I was sleeping! Then one Sunday afternoon after church on our way to lunch, we saw the house on the corner with a "For Sale by Owner" sign in the front yard. We called. We looked. And we fell in love. We made an offer that afternoon and within a month, we moved in.

I loved that little house with it's creaky wood floors and long, skinny living room. In the almost six years we lived there we painted almost every room (we never did paint the breezeway or the laundry room). We pulled off wallpaper in four rooms; textured, painted, and stained the kitchen; added tile and a shower to the front bathroom that only had tub; pulled up carpet and sanded and sealed wood floors; moved light fixtures from one room to the other (and almost caused a divorce in the process); and bought our first "grown-up" furniture. We brought home our sweet new babies to that house. Eli and Phoebe learned to crawl and then to walk on those old hardwood floors. We cried ourselves to sleep when we couldn't get pregnant in that house and the walls resonate with our babies first laughs and words. Over dinners we made great friends and those same friends brought us dinner after we had our babies and left us notes all over the house when I came home from my month-long stay in a Dallas hospital. We spent two years crowded into our little living room with our Huddle as freshmen and sophomores and we walked countless miles around the old tree-lined neighborhood. Every Spring we watched for the "pink tree" to bloom in the front yard and every Summer I used hot bathwater to fill up our little baby pool because our backyard was so shaded the water never got warm. We didn't just reside in that house on the corner, we lived there.

When we closed, it was like finishing the last page of a really good book. You're a little depressed that you're finished, but you'd never trade the experience. You still look forward to the next book on your nightstand (and you know it might even be better), but it's still sad to leave the old book and its characters and language and setting behind. Brad wanted to go over that afternoon and clean out the last few things out of the shed in the backyard, but I told him I couldn't go back. That door was closed...forever.

And it's not that I don't love my house now with it's great big backyard and red kitchen island. Its playroom and craftroom and the memories we are making right here right now. I'm sure when I move out of this house (when they move me to the nursing home because that's the next time I plan to move!), I'll wax poetic about the neighborhood friends the children have made, the memories of birthdays and first days of school and the laughter and heartache we experienced here.

But I'll always miss my little house in town. I'll drive by on the way to church and think about all the wonderful and not-so-wonderful things that happened to us while we lived there. I'll watch for the lilies in the front yard that we planted from Brad's great-grandmother's bulbs and the "pink tree" to blossom at the first sign of Spring. I'll see a little Eli riding his tricycle on the front sidewalk and helping Brad mow the yard. I'll remember Phoebe and her "cripple crawl" across the wood floors and how the children would watch for Brad from the glass door every day after work. I'll let my heart grieve a little for that time in our life that has passed and remember it mostly for the good times.

A house is made of walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams.