Our House

Twenty-three years ago today, on January 19, 1997, we first walked into the house that was to become our home.  We arrived from Chicago the day before and were looking for a place to rent, not buy.  The moment we entered we knew we absolutely had to have it.  We put in an offer the next day.  It took some finagling and the help of family and six weeks later it was ours.

It has been the happiest of places, filled with love.  It has been the saddest of places, the home of a broken heart.  It has provided shelter to three dogs and two birds, a devoted married couple and a devastated widow.  It has been a place of refuge and a place of angst (think nasty neighbors).  It has hosted band practice and countless dinners.  Music and laughter still echo from its corners. It is the place where we fought and made up. It is the place where we laughed and cried.  It echoed with the howls of anguish after a failed IVF cycle.  It is the place that recharged us after long days of work and a week of business travel. It is the place we returned to after learning of the death of my dad and fourteen years later, the death of my mom.  It was the home to which Sonnet traveled across the country with us to spend her last four years and the home that Kona traveled from Texas to live in with his new family. It is the home that Zora traveled to from SoCal to bring joy to two people recovering from the loss of their goofy lab. It was the home that Bubba settled into after being abandoned by his family of twenty years and where he passed being loved on.  It is where Phoenix would scream his lungs out and where he would cower when a hawk would fly close to the window. It is the very sacred space where Tom took his last breath It was Our House. And it was a very very fine house.

I love it today just as much as the first day we moved in.  I still remember the feeling walking down the stairs the first morning thinking "this is ours".  I felt it was the beginning of something great, that we had arrived.  We would stand on our deck at night and marvel at the stars, which could never be seen in Chicago, and admire our view and talk about our home in Chicago where the view was of two brick walls, a used car lot and a tree.

This place, these four walls and the roof, this mass of concrete, wood, metal, glass, gyp board and paint, is far more than a house.  It is a home, my home.  I am extremely grateful for it.  Every time I walk through the door my heart and breathing slow and my shoulder relax because I am home.  Of course the happy greeting by Zora will always make me laugh.  It is now my home--the place where I have healed.  It is still filled with that love and good juju.