Bearing Witness

We moved out of the home we started building 16 years ago last weekend.

I have been trying to put meaning around why leaving a physical space has so much emotion attached to it beyond the obvious and came up with this premise — It bears witness.

Here I am quoting bible verses again.  Go figure.

Your home makes your life real or true.  It becomes the embodiment of your family’s story.  Every nook and cranny has meaning and context.

One Saturday night, all curled up on our sofa watching “The Ring” we got the call my mom died suddenly on a beautiful spring day in April.

John, Becca, Meg and I got all dressed up and went together from our home to the courthouse in Xenia so we could get married one sunny morning in June and walked out a family.

Graduations, homecomings, proms, sleepovers, new loves, lost loves, coming out – you name it – our children experienced so much in this house.  As did their parents.

Last Friday, John, Meg and I took the ashes of our two golden retrievers who lived with us at Murphys to the bridge near our home and sprinkled what remained in the Little Sugarcreek. White and silver fragments of memories hopefully clinging to the rocks and roots below.

While making one of the final passes through the now empty rooms to erase all traces we were ever there, I was cleaning off Meg’s chalkboard wall and came upon her words written in big pink letters, “Go Happily.”   As the cloth in my hand wiped the letters away, it seemed a fitting way to end this chapter.

Meg, Kaelan and I were the last ones at Murphys on Sunday. Keys, garage door openers, architectural drawings all lined up on the island ready to be claimed by someone new. I adjusted that darn plantation blind in the dining room that never stays open one last time.  I thanked the house for its service to our family and for bearing witness to our lives for the past 15 years. Now, it will be memories.  A still frame in our minds.

So, let’s go happily and all the best to the family who will inherit the house that built us.