No Bitter, Just Sweet

The number of sleeps left in this house fits on one hand, and it seems that everyone wants me to feel sad about it. “Are you feeling nostalgic?” one friend asked sympathetically. “Oh, it must be so bittersweet,” said another.

No. Not nostalgic, with its tinge of wistfulness. Not bittersweet either. Just a happy buzz of excitement running in the background, at times overwhelming me with the urge to dance around the kitchen and break into massive grins.

We’ve lived in this house for over 20 years. Julian was not even walking when we moved in, and Bee was born a couple of years later. Two beloved dogs and a cat, plus a guinea pig and if I remember right a hamster, are buried in the back yard. (shhh) We redid the kitchen, replaced all the flooring in the entire house, built a stone patio outside. There are memories of Halloween parties, New Year’s Even open houses, endless pizza nights.

There’s been a lot of life lived here.

What I feel is an immense sense of gratitude. It’s been a great house for us.

The heart of the home

What else is true, though, is that it is time for the next phase of our life. It’s time for this house to be the backdrop for someone else’s memories.

We’ve been talking about heading off for extended cruising since we got back from the Bahamas with the kids in 2010, if not before then. That might have been when we really articulated it to them, maybe, or at least when we first told them, “By the way, we won’t be living in this house much past your high school graduations because we’re going sailing.” That’s ten years of hurry up and wait, ten years of storing memories.

This move has been postponed twice. In March of 2019, Bee asked us to hold off for a year, to allow for a freshman year of college where school breaks could happen at home. Earlier this year, in March of 2020, when we were just a couple of weeks away from listing the house to begin with, the coronavirus reared its head. It felt prudent to hunker down with the kids here. Though the virus hasn’t disappeared, in May it just hit us that it was time to get cracking.

I wonder sometimes if nostalgia is born of a sense of doubt, if bittersweet holds a tinge of regret. We feel neither doubt nor regret. Instead we are jazzed. Jazzed to have had the experiences in this house that we have, yes - and so incredibly jazzed for what is on the horizon.

This time in a few days this will be our view.

View from the deck at the OPO

And come mid-October, or whenever the cold chases us from the lake? This will be our home.

Okay, it’ll be a while before we’re in water this blue.

I keep thinking that we’re in the very sweet spot of being ready for the next adventure and being able to reach for it. It’s almost the polar opposite of where we were in early March, when I wrote this post about grinding gears.

Not bitter, just sweet. Bring it on.