Saying Goodbye

      Today we closed on our house. The papers are all signed. All of our stuff is moved out. The new owners have taken over. It is official. We are without a house. We stopped by one last time, to say our final goodbyes to the only place our little kids have called home. It will always be their first childhood home. And after today, they will never step foot in it again.

      I kept telling myself, “It's only a house.” Four walls and a roof. Let's keep this farewell happy and light. No tears. Yet we worried how our sensitive, young kids would handle leaving their home. Or maybe, I was more worried about how I would handle it. The older I get, the more sentimental I become. Things like 'your childhood home' hold more significance to me than they should. After all, it was only a house.

    I look back on my own childhood home with great fondness. Throughout my adult life, I have thought about it often. I seem to remember some of the simple details about that house. (7 stairs on the top flight, 6 on the bottom) I can tell you how to get across my entire bedroom without touching the hot lava floor. (swing on door knob, swing on doorknob, jump to the window sill). I can even recall how to break in to the basement window when you forget your house key. (come to think of it, maybe it's not a good idea I can still remember that one). That house was where some of my greatest childhood memories happened. I will always have warm fuzzy feelings, when I think about that home. It was only a house, too.

Our house. Our home.

      Of course my expectations for my own kids are to one day look back at their childhood house with the same fondness I have for mine. They will learn to be a sentimental old fool just like me. To help force these future feelings on them, I wanted my kids to leave feeling happy and with closure. A proper goodbye would only help with the warm and fuzzies that I was sure to create. So, one by one, I took them throughout the house saying our good byes. "Goodbye bathroom...Goodbye backyard." There I was, trying to be sweet and sensitive, yet strong and confident. "Goodbye sledding hill" My voice quivered more and more with each room. "Goodbye rainbow bedroom." The kids, they were fine. They trotted along, playing my game, saying their farewells. I, on the other hand, was not. This was really it. I would never see these rooms again. My voice cracked. Tears streamed down one cheek. I hoped they hadn't noticed. Finally, my 7 year old spoke up.

"Poppa, why are you crying?"

"Well...cause I'm sad."

"Sad that we're moving?"

"Yes."

And then she says with perfect simplicity. "If you're sad we're moving... then why did you sell the house?"

      I had no answer for her. I get it. It's only a house. Four walls. A roof. But, I was too busy getting wrapped up in the emotion of the moment to deal with such logical and straightforward thoughts. I had sentimentality to foster. This wasn't the time to be rational. There was great significance to this moment in their young lives, and I was determined to make sure they realized it. Sure, they don't have the perspective that only age can bring. Yes, they are only little kids, and can't fully grasp the importance of events in their lives while they are still unfolding. That was my job. I would show them how to act. I would show them it was all right to weep for a house. I would teach them that when you get old, you cry over things. Like four walls and a roof.

      So we left. We shut the door one last time, and headed out. For good. Some day, I'm sure we'll forget things about that house. We'll forget about things that we looked at every single day for years. Inevitably, details about the house will fade from our memories. I hope it's the simple things that they remember. If I did my job right, they will. And when we get to feeling nostalgic, we can always look through our photos. A complete visual record of our lives in that house. We've taken so many pictures over the last 10 years. Pictures of new babies. Pictures of birthday parties (50 of them in total). Christmas mornings. Hanging out with friends. Most likely over a thousand pictures in the house from the last ten years. We will always have the pictures. And, if in the future we look close enough, maybe we'll notice something else about the photos. Perhaps we'll notice that it wasn't the setting that made the memories special at all. I mean, who even looks at the background in pictures, anyways? Don't we all look at the people in them? Maybe then we'll realize that it's the people in the photos that are important. The people are what makes the memories special. They are all that truly matters. Some day, I'll come to terms with that. Some day, I'll accept that it was just a house.

     But not right now. I don't have time for that. Pass me another tissue. I've got sentimentality to teach.

 

Packing it all up

      Everything we own is going into boxes. Everything. Picture that for a moment. Every sock, every lamp, every towel, every jar of food, every toy, every lawn tool. All of it. It's going into boxes. Big boxes. Tiny boxes. Appliance boxes. That's what you do when you move. You pack your belongings and move them to a new house. It's not that big of a deal. But for us, this time it's different. We're not moving. Sure, we're packing our stuff up. We're wrapping the valuables. We're labeling the boxes. But we're not moving them. Not into a new house, anyways. Just out of this one. Everything we own is going into boxes. Everything.

     We can't really say what our plan is with total certainty. We know we're not buying a house right away. We are certain about that. We also know that we're not even going to rent a place to live right away. That is also certain. The other thing that we are certain about, is that we have to get out of our old house, and get out soon. Without a place to move to, we had to at least find a place for our stuff.

Everything.

A storage locker made the most sense at this point. We found one online, and selected the biggest one we could get. It's 35' by 10'. That's how much room we calculated it would take to hold everything we own. Everything. In a 35 by 10 foot room. Once we put the money down, in our heads, there was no turning back. We were all in. This was happening. We put up shelves, and slowly started filling them up. Trip after trip. Truck load after van load. Our stuff, piled away and neatly stacked, contained in a large metal room. Everything we own is going into boxes, and living in a storage locker.

     It's tough to pack up your life when it's been in one place for so long. We spent ten years of our lives at this house. We started our family here. When we bought this house we were a family of three. Now we total six. We spent a lot of time in this house, and it shows. Having babies (some IN the actual house), raising them to toddlers, and then into young children is a huge endeavor. Add homeschooling to the equation, and that equals a LOT of living in one house. We lived hard in this house. We we're not just casual passer-byes. No. We were entrenched in this house. And apparently, living like this means you end up with a lot of stuff.  Don't get me wrong. We're not hoarders. We're not buried in piles of stuff. I would even say, that we are far less materialistic than the "typical" American family. In fact, we made a concerted effort over the years to constantly purge our house of stuff. We were diligent. We donated bags upon bags to charity every couple of months. We truly admired the minimalist lifestyle, and talked about how great that would be, to live free of your stuff. Yet somehow, without us even trying, the stuff grew. It grew into piles of unfinished projects. Into stacks of half completed artwork. Over here, were the things we'd built ourselves. Over there, the stack of gifts we received. The books we read. The recipes we gathered. The furniture we assembled. The... well... the stuff. That's what it really boils down to. It's all just stuff. So much stuff. And now it all has to go into boxes, and live in a storage locker. All of it. For who knows how long.

I don't think I'll miss any of it.