ON THIS, THE IDES OF MARCH

Welcome to your new home, I said to him as he drifted off to sleep.

Welcome to your new home, mama. His last words on his first night under this, the roof that now houses us. All of us.

Almost all of us, Emet and Jade won’t sleep here for another few nights. But then! Oh, but then. All five of us together again, in a place which by all intents and purposes is considered home for each of us.

We live here now.

It’s been quite the road to this new address, but I have a feeling these walls are ready for us, they have felt familiar since the first time I was in their presence, under a new moon full of optimism and promise. And now, I sit in the living room, surrounded by an eruption of boxes and belongings, with a head swollen with ideas and a heart bursting with adoration for our new baby blue bungalow.

AS I AWAKE TO THE RAYS OF THE SUN

A break was bound to happen sooner or later, there was only so long I could keep up daily posting in the middle of such upheaval. And especially now as my computer is about to be incapacitated for a brief respite as it – along with the rest of us – awaits a new home, there will undoubtedly be an intermission of sorts in this here chronicle of a major life transition.

But, oh! These past two weeks since sweet Huckleberry’s third birthday have been pivotal, and we seem to be headed in a much better direction – like a sudden shifting of the winds, adjusting our sails, altering our course toward a wildly brighter horizon.

Keep doing the work, keep believing in love, keep having faith that good will always prevail.

There are a million tasks to be done as we wrap up our last few days in a house that holds a very special place in my heart. I keep having these moments where I’ll remember there are only so many hours left to hear these familiar creaks and see these quirky corners, intimate details of a space that soon won’t be ours to occupy as we have done these last three and a half years. Longer than I’ve lived anywhere since I was 17 years old – half my life.

I keep trying to freeze frame in my mind the certain vantage points I love, like the way the wall sconce looks over the secretary desk in the front living room if you’re looking across the house from the back den, the small staircase framed just so by the slatted doorway. Or the way the green lamp on the midcentury table looks from the corner of the couch in the office. How the sun lights our bedroom, and the way the prism shines in the late afternoon with that golden radiance, casting rainbows on the baby’s crib in the corner.

Trust me, there is plenty wrong with this place. And terrible things have happened here. I broke my foot on that small staircase I romanticized in the last paragraph! The electricity throughout the entire structure is shoddy, a lightbulb exploded overhead inches away from where Mister Baker and I were standing just a few days ago, and that is not the first time it has happened. The plumbing is awful, the cabinetry needs reworking, the appliances are old, the linoleum needs replacing, the house needs to be resealed. So much work is needed to realize the potential of this space. And it’s not work we were ever going to do.

I am not sad about leaving, I am simply nostalgic for a chapter in my life I absolutely loved writing.

As it turns out, this next chapter is having a surprisingly strong start.

The next couple of days are going to be intense as we race to get the last things organized for storing, for selling, for donating, for tossing. We are so close! But the last part is always the hardest. And then, of course, the actual moving. But, then! Oh, but then, comes the fresh start. A fresh start for Spring, it couldn’t sound lovelier. If the plans we have set in motion unfold accordingly, we’ll be waking up in our new home just as the Earth herself begins to rise from her long Winter’s sleep.