Leaving the Love Notes - Taking the Love

So, it looks like we have a renter for our house.  It's an adorable young family with two preschool aged girls who are currently living in an apartment complex about a mile from our home.  Last Thursday the wife came with our property manager to "prescreen" the house, and she immediately loved it and handed in her check to hold their "spot."  The only catch is that they want to move in at the end of May, and we were hoping to move at the beginning of April.  But we thought a lot about it, and decided that it would be a whole lot less stressful for all three of us if we just took the next two months to slowly pack and adjust to the upcoming changes.  Right now we are just waiting for their application to go through (credit/referral/
background checks), and if it does, we should have a signed lease in the next couple of days.  Having a signed lease is a huge weight off of my shoulders even though I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea of leaving our house.  


In the eight years that we have been married Jude and I have lived in six different houses/cottages/apartments, two different countries, and three different states, and I have never had as hard of a time leaving a home as I am having leaving this one.  It's hard to put my finger on any one reason why, and that's probably because it boils down to a million little reasons, and not just one reason in particular.  We built this house from the ground up.  We watched from the moment they cleared the first trees, to the installation of the very last doorknob.  Together we picked out our flooring, cabinets, counters, light fixtures, and we labored for days over paint swatches.  We wrote blessings and love notes to each other on the wooden frame holding the house together.  It was here was had our moments of deepest sorrow and greatest joy with the death of the vision for our family, and the rebirth of that vision with my pregnancy.   I spent hours planning Solomon's nursery, and Judah spent hours with a paintbrush- bringing my vision to life.  Just last week we saw Solomon take his first steps in that nursery, and I promise that when I sit in that room (in the rocking chair that Judah reupholstered for my birthday), I can just feel love oozing out of every corner.  We became a family in this home.


Our house is more than just a building - it's a container of memories.  I could write a book about all the memories I have from the short 2.5 years we have lived here, and it is difficult for me to leave that season behind.  When I look at the kitchen I see Judah, standing in the middle, pots simmering, towel over shoulder.  Judah's love for cooking began a long time ago, but his career as a chef began here.  The smudges on back door window remind me of a peek-a-boo game between Jude and Sol, complete with silly faces and sticky fingers pressed up against the glass.  Every time I shower I remember the hours I spent in the bathtub breathing through early labor, dreaming about my baby between contractions, and trying to wait until the last second before going to the hospital.  Each room holds a dozen memories.  Memories with too many details to remember, but that are much too precious to forget.


So, when I look around, and I start to feel sad about leaving the only house I have ever really felt connected to, I tell myself that it's just a building. It's just a building.  And I remember those love notes, written on the beams inside our walls, and I laugh at the irony.  The beams may be holding this building together, but in the end, it was our love that made the memories that made it feel like a home.  Lucky for us, that part will come with us wherever we go.