The house is all packed up. We’ve been working on it for days. Weeks really. We paid the movers do bulk of it and yesterday the house was just a maze of boxes. Now it’s empty I’m sitting in it and I’m trying hard to hold it together. The house seems small now that it’s empty. Which in some ways makes it a little bit easier. It doesn’t really feel like our house right now.

But it’s not hard for me to imagine where the furniture was not that long ago. To imagine what it was like to play with Conor on the floor when he was a baby and watch him take his first steps in the living room. To stand with him in the window and watch Preston build his shop and then later the swing set. To watch Conor play in the backyard with Luna to watch the deer eat the ivy. Never enough ivy to actually make a dent, mind you, but they did all the same. It’s easy to recall what it was like when we decided to buy this house. How much room we had. How adult it felt. How familiar it was being, of course, that it’s in the neighborhood I grew up in and has roughly the same floor plan as my parents’ house. It’s not a perfect house. There have always been things about it that make me crazy. For instance, I never really understood why they gave it granite countertops but never did anything with the cabinets. (I loved the kitchen once we painted it.) I also never understood why in the world the laundry room was on the other side of the house and you had to go outside on to the screen porch and another set of doors to get to it. Laundry always got stuck in the living room because who wants to schlep it all the way to the back of the house when you can just sit there on the couch and fold laundry which then inevitably got sat on by the cats and then needed washing again.
I can see Conor’s room completely torn up and covered with toys. I can still see the spot in our bedroom where his pack and play was when he was little. It was at the foot of our bed. One night we came in and he had asparagus for dinner. Of course he was sleeping and wearing a diaper and when we came in I thought something horrible had happened – it smelled so terrible. An important lesson was never ever feed a baby asparagus.

There’s the spot on the floor that the cat’s destroyed, and marks on the wall where art used to hang but the command strips didn’t work quite as well as we’d hoped there’s a spot that Lucy always rubs her face up against and it’s brown and I wonder if I should clean it but I don’t think I’m going to.

I can see the boys laughing in the hall and throwing the ball back and forth and I can hear Conor playing on a swing set outside singing to himself. I can also hear the mosquitoes. (I feel like we have more than our fair share.) His heights are captured on the door jam in the kitchen.

It’s dark, but if it were morning I could look out and see all the plants I’ve gathered over the years from my parents and from friends in the Garden Club. Plants I purchased with expert advice from friends and somehow managed to keep alive. There’s a key buried under one of the rocks in the garden but I don’t remember which one so I guess it’s just going to stay there. I also can’t remember where all the bulbs are so I envision the new people living here will be kind of amazed when daffodils just randomly start popping up in the natural area with no particular reason because while I love to garden I’ve never been particularly good at it nor had a knack for where things belong. So somewhere around February, there are just going to be plants popping up all over. I hope they don’t think that they’re weeds. Of course there are plenty of those as well. I want to take the new owners aside and explain that green and golds – even though they look like weeds – are really lovely plants and they are native to the area so try to be gentle with those.

I want them to know that the irises are from Brenda down the street. And if they need more purple ones they can ask. She usually divides them up at the end of the summer. And that there’s a peony in there somewhere and they should be careful not to kill it and then in a couple of years they’ll get some lovely blooms. I wonder if they’ll notice the one hyacinth – there’s just one. Someone gave it to me as a gift and I planted it just to see if it would stay alive and it did.

Do you think they’ll feed my bluebirds? I had a whole family this year. 6 or so little babies that flitted around all over the backyard. I didn’t even know what they were at first. I thought they were some new flock that I’ve never noticed before and then when I looked it up turns out juvenile blue birds don’t look a thing like adult bluebirds except for a little bit of blue underneath their wings. I left the bluebird box. I can always get one from the credit union but felt like I did want my birds to feel like they had to move just because I did.

The thing is, I know it’s just a house. I know its walls and floors and paint and an aging electrical system. And I am firm in the understanding that we have made the right decision. Moving into a townhouse is going to really help us simplify our life. We will be able to spend more time together and have more money to do fun things we want to do and the laundry room will be next to the bedrooms. It all makes perfect sense. It’s an incredibly logical decision but I so very excited! Our new house is amazing and we are so lucky. (When we are settled, I will tell you more about it!!)

But tonight in this echoey house full of absolutely nothing but my memories, I’m feeling awfully sad. Life just doesn’t quite turn out like you thought it would. So, you make decisions the best you can that are the best for your family and that moment in that circumstance. And then maybe, when you’re finished cleaning the refrigerator, you turn on the Wicked soundtrack and you sing really loudly. Because the acoustics in an empty house with hardwood floors really can’t possibly be matched.

I guess there’s a little good at everything.