Tomorrow, we sell the house that we lived in for the past twenty-five years. It’s the house where we raised our children. It’s the place where we celebrated 25 Christmas mornings with wide-eyed wonder after pulling all-nighters putting together kitchen sets and bicycles. It’s where I rocked children with fever through the night, corralled brownie troops with crafts, and tossed a million basketballs into the net to spell HORSE. It’s where music filled the rooms with children’s piano lessons and later, songs from pensive daughters home from college. It’s where we drank wine by candlelight with chatty neighbors when the electricity went out for a few days after a hurricane, and where we grilled outside and met lifetime best friends with the neighbors that we shared day-to-day life with. It’s where we lived life and lived life big. And, it was where I experienced the most meaningful part of my life to date.
Selling the house will officially close that chapter in our lives.
I’m not usually sentimental about things like this, but this has me misty-eyed this evening. It’s just a house, but this particular house was the big gift box with a bow that contained all the beautiful memories that became our family treasures.
As I close the door to the old house tomorrow, I’ll say a prayer that the next family will enjoy new joys of their own within those walls. And I will whisper from the depth of my heart an understated thank you for the privilege of having been a family there.
It’s so hard to imagine saying goodbye to this period of our lives, but we are looking forward to the days ahead as we return to the homestead where my grandmother raised her own children, and we will embrace a simpler life of vegetable gardens and boots with big dogs and hay bales.
But none of us will soon forget the wonder years we experienced at 16007 Stewarts Grove Drive.
a view through annie's eyes 
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