For the past week, my husband and I have been on our last Spring Break trip with our Senior in high school daughter and her three friends…heading back to reality now, I’m thinking about home.
It is good, once in a while, to get away from the day-to-day routine of life. And I certainly had a wonderful trip with lots of rest and sunshine. Being away reminds me of those things I value most in my life.
Sitting on the airplane, I now peruse the More magazine I purchased to read before I was allowed to use my computer or Kindle. In the magazine is a collection of essays of different women’s definitions or perspectives of “Home”. It was a thought-provoking read. My husband and I are currently in the process of selling the home our children were raised in and building a new home we have designed for our little “farmette”.
The home our children were raised in was perfect for our family. A funky city house, it has a “kids wing” complete with three bedrooms and two baths where our growing children could escape the adults. The “family room” space had many lives, including being an art room complete with a multitude of art supplies, canvasses, and an art table, a sleep-over room with a fold down full size futon (which the dogs mostly slept on), party central for birthdays and Play Station (now Wii) tournaments, and its current role as a TV room with a big screen, surround sound, and cushy sectional.
When our daughter graduates, if we haven’t already sold the house, this part of the house will go unused. My kids, mostly, and my husband, a little, are struggling with selling the house, I think because of all the memories of being raised, and raising our children there.
But, for me, those memories are a part of my being. I don’t need a house to remind me of the tiled stairs where my barely four year old daughter fell and ended up with four stitches on her forehead 2 weeks after moving into the house. Of frantically driving, barefoot, through the neighborhood trying to find the local hospital with my 6 year old waiving down a homeless man for directions. Or the cozy bedroom off the kid’s family room my son chose because it was his “cave”. The weekend my brother and I spent together re-tiling the living room fireplace with broken black marble tiles (long gone since the renovation). The beloved guinea pigs, rats and hamsters buried in my garden. The civil war “ghost” at the top of the bedroom stairs my nephew used to “talk “ to and I attempted to exorcise with chants and a sage stick …Why not? The wonderful parties, meals, holidays, birthdays and anniversaries celebrated with friends and family…most still a part of our lives, some moved on to new places and new friends. These things are all a part of my collective…who I am, who I have become…me…they won’t disappear because I live in a different house.
I like to say that if the house was burning down the only things I’d save are my family and my pets…and if I had time, the photos. Nothing else is all that important in the scheme of things.
