Interrupted Wanderlust: Closing Time

Closing Time

16 Comments posted by Kristi on Friday, October 09, 2009 at 12:00 AM

Nine years and five months ago, in May of 2000, a 1925-built, three-bedroom colonial with leaded glass windows, crown moulding, a fireplace, a breakfast nook, a screened-in porch, and a small in-ground pool went on the market.

We were the first people to look at the house. I was 24. The hubs was 28. We had been house-hunting for awhile. The real estate market was crazy in my area at the time. We had been outbid on two different houses in the same town by people bidding over asking price. Our agent at the time got us in to see the house before anyone else did. We fell in love with what we saw, and put in our offer that night. It was accepted the following day.

Two months later, we and our three cats moved in.

A few weeks later, we were engaged.

Although we had been living together in an apartment for two years prior to buying our house, this home...this home that we both love so dearly, is where we truly began.

This is the living room whose paint color I chose and which everyone, including the hubs, told me was hideously dark and would make the room look smaller.

I held my ground (shocking, I know) and we have received compliments on the color from the naysayers from the day it went on the walls.

This is our dining room, the room that held the table at which the hubs and I sat to play hundreds of thousands of games of Scrabble, at which I usually wiped the floor with him.

This is the ottoman in our living room on which four years ago I sat sobbing my eyes out while a nurse told me over the phone that after two years of trying to conceive, multiple IUIs, and one IVF, Isabella was on her way.

This is my kitchen's breakfast nook, one of my favorite spots in my house, where two years later I sat in utter disbelief upon hearing that my FET had, indeed worked, and that I was pregnant once again.

This is the room we brought Isabella home to

And this is the room we brought her brother and sister home to (although admittedly, it looked more like this until the twins were about 4 months old).

You all know why I love our house so much. And yet on Tuesday of next week, it will no longer belong to us.

We're moving today and renting our new house for a few days before closing on the sale of our house and the purchase of the new one. I am shipping the kids over to my grandma's this morning so she and my aunt can watch them for the day. And then I will return to my house of nine years, load up the truck with the boxes containing my life, and move them to a house that's as foreign to me as another planet. It will be awhile before the new house becomes a home.

Yesterday I was in the new house alone for the first time. I was waiting for someone from the company we had clean our house on Wednesday to return and fix the faucet one of the staff had inadvertently broken. I was moping around the empty house, and while I was a bit excited about the space in this new house, what I was really thinking is that this house was not my house. I looked out my bedroom window, and in the backyard a female deer was lounging under a tree. My house is in a suburban neighborhood very near the city, and nowhere near a park or forest or anywhere you might normally find deer.

But more interesting to me than the sight of a deer chilling out in my backyard was the fact that a single ladybug was clinging to the glass on the outside window pane.

So that either means that I'm pregnant again (God help me, and also completely impossible), or it means that while I am going to miss my old house and my neighbors (especially my incredible next-door neighbors) terribly, everything is eventually going to be alright.

Closing Time

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