Chapter Two

So, we’re out. Totally out. Lights out, door locked. We were going to stay until Monday but we closed in the late morning and it would have been pretty chaotic trying to get out of there and get ready and everything so we decided to head to my sister’s on Sunday. When we finally crashed into bed that night, Jeff turned to me and said “I still can’t believe we did this! We’re actually moving. I didn’t think it would really happen.” He’s been proclaiming his disbelief for days now and I always poo-pooed it because we do LOTS of things that we didn’t think we could do, like adopting a baby from Korea, but when he said it last night I totally agreed with him. Yeah, we had some bumps along the way, and by bumps I mean giant, steaming, festering piles of crap that impeded our progress and at times almost killed the deal. I couldn’t write about a lot of the things that happened since I was on my GAG ORDER but now I can talk. The guy who put the contract down did so 9 days after we started showing. Within 24 hours we had another contract. Then a day later my neighbor told us her brother was moving here from California and HE wanted to buy it. Then a FOURTH party came forward but at that point we decided to accept the first offer and roll. Ideally it would have been the neighbor’s brother but there was a delay in getting his job transfer and then the new house people were going to kick us out of our contract unless we removed our sale contingency and that’s when we went into high gear and went for it and firmly decided that this is what we were doing no matter what. Soon inspections, new roofs, tuckpointing, cleaning and more cleaning and a LOT of stress ensued.

All of a sudden the time was here and soon there was a storage pod outside and on Friday night a bunch of guys from Jeff’s work came and loaded our lives into it. Funny story, on Friday night, around 9pm and after everyone had gone home AND after having spent the better part of 3 hours getting the thing loaded, Jeff went to shut the door of the storage pod and couldn’t It was jammed. We could only move it about 12 inches up or down. We were exhausted and I couldn’t take it anymore, especially considering Jeff told me that if we couldn’t shut it, we were going to have to sleep outside on the street to guard our stuff, so I stood in front of the house crying into the phone, telling the storage people what had happened and them telling me there wasn’t anything they could do. Next thing I knew, Jeff was inside it climbing up the treadmill to try and un-jam the lock. He was victorious, despite a cut on the arm and a smashed finger. That sums up this whole experience. It worked out despite some bruises along the way.

On Sunday, as I stood at the sink washing out the remnants of our family from the refrigerator shelves, I started thinking about everything that this house meant to us. This house was why Jeff and I were together. When he bought it 12 years ago, the bathrooms had peeling wallpaper that I would tease him about every time I visited because it was such a typical bachelor pad. Finally one day he was sick of my teasing and said “fine, then come over and redo my bathrooms” and I did. I had known Jeff for many years but spending a weekend crammed into a 5’x5’ bathroom together does things to you and by the end of the weekend I was in love. Our first date was about a week later and the rest is history. This house is also where we secretly got engaged about a month before he did it publicly, it was where my Meemaw came to live out her last weeks, it was where we spent many sleepless nights with our new son, it was where we fought, made up and planned out our lives together. That house was our constant.

When I finally mopped us out the door and turned off the lights for the last time, I turned to Jeff and cried again. I told him I didn’t know why I was still crying and he said it was because I wasn’t made of stone but I think it was because I was sad to say goodbye to this pile of bricks that had Jeff and I written all over it. Every inch of that house was a part of us. As I pulled away and watched the house fade away in the rearview mirror, I smiled and remembered about the new chapter we were starting and how when Max is big I’ll tell him stories of the house where his mom and dad made their family.