The girls have just left for ballet class, one of the last ones they will have here at the local rec center. Their dance performance is this Saturday. It will mark the last weekend of activities in our home prior to our move. The house is closing, and May 26th is fast approaching. Our house has Sold.
We have been taking things off the walls and you can now hear echoes more clearly than at any other time. It used to be my voice and my wife’s voice that you could hear before, but as the girls were born and more things went up on the wall, framing our lives and our home, the echoes seemed to disappear.
Now, they are back. Almost as if the house is speaking to us.
The past few mornings the girls have been getting up early and not coming downstairs but going straight into their playroom and playing. They have not done that in a long time, maybe they realize that their time here is dwindling down as they are very aware we are moving. Maybe the house is calling to them, “come play, come and play”. They seem to have taken it in stride, especially with this past weekend’s garage sale event, that the community had. All of our extra items we don’t wish to take with us out for sale to others.
I am listening to Pandora as I always do and a song came on “Where we once stood”.
Couldn’t help but make me think of our home and how very soon it won’t belong to us. My wife told me that after church this Sunday she finally heard and got the message after many weeks of going there to hear the sermons. I told her that whether we are in a castle or in a tent, as long as we are together, happy, loving one another and healthy, we will always be fine and I will be happy also. She agreed.
Still, I tend to get attached to things, cars, places and now a home, my home, my first home. The only home I have known and the first place my daughters called home, or our casa.
My mood seems to be matching the day, it is raining and overcast. Makes me want to take a long nap, with my family in our bed all of us together. To stay here, a snapshot of all things good and prosperous for us. I have to remind myself we did not plan to move because I had lost my job and we could not afford the house any longer, but to move up North to be closer to my in laws as the girls love them so. I am not going begrudgingly, not at all. I know it is the right thing for my wife and my daughters. I am just fine with that. I just wish we could transplant this house, my job up North, to be next to them.
Losing my job because of the layoff has made this more difficult as I feel we are leaving everything behind. It is good practice for me to apply the lessons I have learned in the past and to stop looking in the rear view mirror as the road ahead is long and filled with many new adventures. Nothing new can come into my hands, if I keep them clenched holding on to things long gone. I am opening up my hands and praying for them to be filled with new things for myself and my family. A new home, a new life, a new career, financial stability and financial freedom from worry. For happiness to stay with us and for blessings and favors to continue to find us.
I have started to take more pictures around the house lately, to remind the girls of certain events during our time here, and to help keep the memories that were so special to me, to us, alive. I know this place will eventually be just another place that we lived in, I had just hoped that it would be easier for me to say goodbye to these walls. They have been immersed in our love, our laughs, our bad times and good times. We have spilled many drinks of gatherings on the floor, many bits of food crumbs, for all the dinners we have shared here, as a family and while having guests over.
Our daughters were conceived in our bedroom and their laughter filled this quiet house. Replacing the echoes that were very prevalent in the beginning.
Now, there are more boxes that fill the house than toys. The pink dresses are being put away, to be opened up and used in a new location. And very soon, the house that became a home to me, we will be leaving, and driving away from it one last time, to never return again. Feels like I will be leaving a loved one behind, hoping the next family will be just as kind to it and appreciative of it, as we were.
Maybe before stepping outside the house for the last time, and locking the door behind us, I will speak to the house and simply say “Thank you, Goodbye”. Praying to hear the echo say, Your Welcome, Goodbye.
watkuweis ~~ 