The sole goal of all the expense, headache and emotional
trauma of completely redoing this house top to bottom, inside and out, was to
sell it and settle once and for all in our new hometown an hour north. Children
no longer at home, living grown adult lives of their own and my husband and I
were embarking on the delightfully new adventure of feathering our empty nest.
The solution to boomerang back certainly shook up our plans,
but as much as I had initially fought this change, I now find myself embracing
it and almost resisting the idea of moving again for quite a while. My husband
is still struggling with the reentry into our old home, but I can only be here
to listen to him and give him positive feedback on my experience, he’ll need to
achieve the peace I have found on his own.
When we moved in, we kept only a few rooms as they had been.
We repurposed most of them. My old studio became my husband’s man cave. The
former guest room became my office. The bedrooms of our children became a guest
room and workout room. Even the sunroom, which was largely just 20 feet of
something to walk through to reach the backyard has become an oasis that we
enjoy tremendously and spend time on each morning as we share a latte and have
a quiet, connecting start to our days.
The level of resistance to this move was incredibly high for
me, and I cried enough tears to end the drought in California once and for all,
or so it felt. But then, with the passing of our beloved aunt and her last
words gently chiming in my ears and seeing each day the time we had to spend
with my inlaws and be of comfort, assistance and support to them erased any
doubts I’d had about this being the right thing. The move somehow became the
best thing and my level of peace was extreme.
The adaptation of ‘the big house’ to be ‘the love nest’ has
been completed for...me. I feel that I have almost everything I ever wanted from
the move, right here where we started. The only component that I don’t have is
the ability to walk three blocks to downtown. But I am okay with that right
now. I am a few minutes from what seems like…everything. I have neighbors I
adore and enjoy spending time with. I have a beautiful vista out my back
windows and doors that is soothing and restorative to my soul. The flood of
happy memories in this home has been a wonderful surprise as well…things I’d
nearly forgotten are well remembered now.
My emotional attachment to the tiny Love Nest is releasing,
bit by bit. I am letting go of that space because the things I needed from it,
and needed so very desperately three years ago when we purchased it, are the
things I carried with me back here.
Peace. Quiet. Sloughing off layers of things that did not matter any
longer. Respite from the world. Finding who I am in this phase of my life.
Casting off what I did not love and embracing deeply what I value.
So while I’m back, I am not the same. I am changed. I am
different. I am not on a circuitous journey, but continuing to move forward,
even if to some it seems like same old/same old, I know it is far from that. It
is delightfully new in so many ways and comfortably familiar in others and I am
celebrating both sides of this equation.
In Girl Scouts I was taught a song “Make new friends, but
keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” It applies to my life right
now, I’ve mined both silver and gold in this new/old home and feel richly
blessed for having settled in peacefully.
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