October 25, 2012

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.




3 comments:

  1. Still here still reading your blog just so that you know and want to tell you too that I love your banner! :) <3 Just been sick and busy and discouraged and sick and busy and discouraged lol xo

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  2. Isn't it weird how places we don't totally love, places we can detach ourselves from, find a way, somehow, slinking into our hearts?

    I think it's because of memories. You built your family there. You have holidays. Birthdays. All those things that brought you all so much love. Dinners with friends or whatever.

    Take pictures. Your kids will (maybe? Don't know their ages!) remember it and photos will be nice reminders when memories fade. They always do.

    I love this story, though. It sounds like magic to me. How you wrote down the house will sell. That you circled it. That is happened. That twice, you put it out there that this should happen, and it did. Twice.

    I had to laugh about the pastor + Halloween. Maybe he wouldn't have liked all the snowmen at Christmas. He'd want Jesus + Mary, right? ;)

    Thank you for sharing. Can you tell yet how much I love your blog? I almost feel stalkerish. I promise I'm not, though. lol

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. oh becky, i love your reponse. and here i am responding more than a year later because it was just last week that i discovered a bunch of comments that blogger determined was "spam" - boo on that. but i was also hunting down an old post and stumbled upon this one. i'm writing, right now, about how quickly time's gone by but there have been days lately that i've had to question whether we sold that house last year or the year before. in many ways, it seems so much further away, longer ago. it seems like you and i did the flying lessons e-course much more than just 14-ish months ago.

      life is so strange and so awesome and i know SO much has shifted and changed/happened for you this year, too. just yesterday i was thinking about that pastor and the sale almost falling through because of the silly decorations - your comment made me chuckle, i forgot i'd shared that bit.

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thanks you for making a connection. all comments and feedback are like little sprinkles of starshine!

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