good-bye old house

as of this morning, old house is officially sold. title transfered. done deal.

as some of you may know, the old house never felt really like ours, not like mine. i had not expected to live there so long and never really wanted to live there at all. that sense of detatchment allowed me to distance myself in the beginning of september when we were preparing to put it on the market. it was stressful but i kept it under the surface, remaining uninvolved, faithful that it would all work out.

we got an offer within ten days. good sign, i thought. i wanted to jump up and down and squeal in giddiness because i had just sat outside and repeated to myself: ask and you shall receive, knock and the door shall open, seek and you shall find, only moments before the realtor called. my husband was all sorts of less than enthusiastic and i remembered not to count the eggs until they hatch.

after our counter-offer, the deal fell through. the potential buyer was a pastor and unfond of our neighbor's massive collection of inflatable halloween decorations. in jest, i wanted to tell her to wait - they go all out at christmas, managing to fill up a 12 x 12 space with every inflatable snowman wal-mart ever sold.

anyway. stress. i could sense my husband saying i told you so in his head even though he's too nice of a guy to really even think such a thing. about a week later we got a second offer. we braced ourselves again. this time i did jump and down.

the next day our realtor submitted the counter-offer and later that evening she called my husband. we'd received another offer. cash money. this time i made my husband jump and down with me.

that was last week. today it's done. today i cried.

it came without warning and left just as swiftly. the reflection, rewarding.

it was the first house my husband purchased. it was also the place he'd lived the longest, a third of his life. divided further; the first five years spent with another woman, the next five years alone after his mother died, the eighteen months before i moved in just weeks before giving birth, and almost five years with us, our family.

that house was the most crowded, nerve-wracking space i've ever lived in and i made the best of it, arguably after i made the worst of it. i didn't like the house but in it i fell in love with a man i knew would someday be my husband, i gave birth to his first son, i learned to live with the ghosts. the entire time i lived in near-constant back or hip pain and in that house i filled a void by shopping too much. then i found the strength to purge and pack and keep it clean because i had to show it to potential renters with a baby and toddler underfoot. in that house i learned more lessons in patience and self-preservation than i knew i needed.

i suppose i thought letting go would be tear-free since i wasn't really emotionally invested and detachment came easy. after the first offer fell through i wrote down that i wanted the house to sell. that it would sell. that it was sold. i drew a circle around the words.

it was swift, possibly because the process of letting go started when i moved in there with the intention that we'd only be there six months, possibly a year. when things didn't go as planned, i endured. we grew. that house was small and sometimes miserable but always full to the brim with love.