The In-between: If walls could talk

What would our house say if these walls could talk?

As I write this, we are currently spending our last night in the house that has been our home since late 2008; it’s fair to say that this week has been pensive. Moving has been an interesting experience. Given I spent my childhood moving houses every couple of years, you would think that I am used to moving around. Yet, this home has been the longest that I’ve ever been in the one house. Saying goodbye to it has been more emotional than I was expecting it to be.

This is the home we chose when decided we wanted to live together. It has seen us through the ups and downs of our relationship. It has seen us through our engagement. It is the home we lived in as I battled my way through serious post-traumatic stress and back to health. It is the home we lived in when we got married. It is the home we filled with animals, slowly building our little menagerie until it felt just right. It is the home we lived in when we negotiated our terms around having a family, and it is the home we brought our son into. It is the home where we have watched him grow into a little boy, just shy of starting school and full of wonder at life. 

We bought this home just as I started teaching so it has seen me grow through all the highs and lows of that experience, through to changing the school that I worked at and finding my place in the new one. It has seen my husband through changing his workplace too and it has witnessed the joy we have both found in those new positions. We have shared this home with our family and friends, filling its walls with our adventures. Our lives fill this space, memories flooding me as I move through its now empty rooms.

Remembering. 

There have been plenty of tears. Our son cries when he thinks too long on leaving, for this is the only home he has known. I cry too. Leaving what is familiar and comfortable is hard.  

However, despite the nostalgia that now pervades these walls, I am also excited for the adventure to come, for the prospect of building a new home with my little family and filling a new house with the minutiae of our lives. For surely it is within that minutiae where living really happens, and I am excited for the lifetime that is ahead of us!

It is with fondness that I look upon these rooms now as we prepare to leave.

This is the home that has housed our laughter and our tears, our joy and our grief, our anger and our tantrums, and perhaps more importantly, it is the home that has seen us through the everyday existence of our lives, keeping us safe and warm, comfortable in the knowledge that within these walls is the space we are forever welcome. 

If these walls could talk, surely they would tell a love story.