Seven and a half miles is, in the big picture, a very short distance. Back in my fitter days, I could cover that distance in about 35 minutes on a bike, and somewhere between 60 and 120 minutes on foot, depending on stamina.
But for our family, relocating our base of operations that distance was intended to completely alter the way we approach day-to-day life.
This, of course, is an overly grand pronouncement. It’s also nothing we were able to quantify for several weeks after we moved in June, because with four young children everything is ruled by the school schedule and so the summer was spent in a sort of altered reality wherein we had belongings packed and unpacked at the old house, the new house and sometimes at other people's houses just because that was the easiest thing to do in the moment. We had jobs and camps and child care and summer school to juggle and the concept of our real “new life” didn’t start until we’d had the three oldest in school for a few weeks.
Now we’re just a few days a way from winter break. Everyone is quite settled (and thriving, by all accounts, in case anyone’s wondering) and, well, we finally were able to actually sell the old place. Today. No more keys, no more garage door openers. A house empty of possessions but chock full of memories and somewhere around 11 a.m. we backed down the driveway one last time, formally closing the longest chapter of our married life.
We put the thing on the market so long ago I can’t quite pinpoint the date. April something? February? Definitely long enough for a few price drops, a few more cosmetic upgrades and beginning to wonder if this might be another 18-month odyssey like the last one we tried to sell. (I promise, we heave really really REALLY learned our lesson this time.) But then in early November we got an offer, accepted and navigated the ensuing negotiations. The most challenging part, mentally, was trying to find the motivation to power through the final departure while simultaneously remembering these deals can fall apart with little notice. That duality left little room for my natural predilection for indulgent nostalgia. Also I had to throw away a lot of crap I should have gotten rid of years ago.
We lived at our red house for seven years, moving there in early 2009 as a family of four and leaving in mid-2016 as a family of six. It wasn’t even red when we bought it. The blue was all right, but the red really popped, and for some reason it always made me feel good when neighbors complimented me on the choice. This was weird because any of them could have painted their house the same color, and also it was my wife’s idea in the first place. She’s very wise.
We loved the house (though we filled it) and especially the neighborhood and our neighbors. But as we approached a family crossroads, and without wading into the type of minute details that make up one particular family’s pro and con lists, eventually a consensus emerged about the reality of the situation. Decisions were made, things fell into place, and anyone who has bought or sold a house understands in general terms what this entails. We moved almost everything ourselves (she and I rented a truck and filled it and drove it down and unloaded it and then repeated the process, stopping only to fill ourselves with fried food) and then went back the next day for more.
For a while there we were spending big chunks of each day at the old place. Then it was maybe a few days each week, then every Tuesday night and before long not at all. We paid the kid across the street to keep the lawn cut, trusted some other neighbors to alert us to any funny business and every so often had to swing by because we forgot to tell Amazon to ship us something at the new place. This is a leading reason we got stuck in city traffic on our way east and north to Michigan for a long weekend in July.
But now it’s officially gone. When we moved in the oldest was a few weeks shy of his fifth birthday. The first weekend we had a first birthday party for the baby. As long as I live I think I’ll always remember the Friday night we dropped everything to drive two hours north to look at the place, and the boys just chased each other around the empty living room and kitchen, shrieking with delight and indirectly telling their parents what the immediate future would hold.
We brought home two more baby boys over the next seven years. One came home just a few weeks after a faulty sewer line more or less destroyed the basement and a big chunk of the main floor. The other fell asleep nearly every night for what seems like two solid years (but probably was more like two months) while sitting in my lap near the front window, listening to music, sucking on my thumb and pinching the loose skin between it and my index finger.
It’s been 876 words to get me to this point and it strikes me I could spend 87,600 trying to recount the highs and lows of family life from March 2009 to June 2016. Not that any family couldn’t do the same — especially families with four kids — but when you bookend all those memories under that one roof, from the first time you opened the door until the last time you closed it, well, maybe that explains why I wish I’d just stopped fighting and let the tears stream down my face.
We don’t ever get to write our own stories, because there’s 7 billion people on the planet and what they do affects us, not to mention the environment, outer space and whatever unseen forces hold it all together. But even the stuff we do sort of control isn’t always ours. We don’t always get to say when we’re done working — sometimes the boss tells us we’re not needed. We vow “until death parts us” but, well, sometimes other factors win the race. When we first looked at the house on that cold winter Friday, we hoped everything that happened there would be on our terms, that we would leave only when we were ready. As difficult as it has been to leave those memories behind, there is comfort in knowing we got to say how the story ended. We have similar hopes now for our white bungalow with the green roof, and those hopes alone would require tens of thousands of their own words.
Likewise, moving those seven and a half miles isn’t really all that difficult. Earlier this year some of our dear friends packed up after a decade-plus or so in the suburbs and headed home-ish to the Pacific Northwest. That required round after round of tearful goodbyes and days of driving off into the relative unknown. I didn’t even have to start using a new grocery store.
But still, we loved that house. We really, really did. It will always be the backdrop of countless life stories — happy, sad, frustrating and otherwise. I literally took thousands of pictures there and shot hours of video and we can drive by the front door any time we have a half hour to spare. (That, of course, is a false promise: When you have four children you never have a half hour to spare. If nothing else, you ought to be home folding laundry or washing dishes.) I am a giant ball of emotions right now, but the one I choose to place at the center is appreciation for the house that let us turn it into a home. For the wife and children who make up our family. Without sharing those years there with and for them, that old shack wouldn’t mean anything to me.
We cry because we love. We love the house because we loved being there together. And now we move forward, together, remembering our family is bigger than the walls and roof that keep us dry and (mostly) warm. I hope I don’t have another day like this for literally 40 or 50 years, but I am exceedingly grateful to be able to bask today in appreciation of that special place. Goodbye, and thank you.