We said goodbye to our house yesterday. A house that we bought 7 years ago, with hopes and dreams. A lot of the hopes came true in that we renovated an old, neglected home in Aiken,SC. The house hadn't been lived in for over ten years when we bought it and it showed. I was pretty disgusted when I first saw the interior (it was really gross!!), but Jonathan had a vision and it turned out that he wasn't wrong. We made it our home and it wasn't perfect, but it ended up being a lovely space to live in. Painting, sanding, staining floors, designing the kitchen, watching it transform from a total mess into a home that we loved was pretty fun. We learned a lot of different skills that neither of us ever imagined we would know how to do. We said goodbye to a few of our older pets while living there and we welcomed two new four legged members to our family. We had many ebbs and flows in our attempts to continue to make a living, all the while working on the house whenever we could afford it. After a while, five years to be exact, we looked each other in the eyes and said, "Enough". It had become clear that we had to make a change to continue, or we were going to fail financially. Things weren't pretty. Fast forward to now. Now. Here we are. We bolted for the north two years ago and managed to find a job that's a perfect fit for both of us. On a whim, we listed our house for sale at the end of November and it went under contract in a few days. Wow. Our house is intended to close on January 15th so a new person can enjoy the space and property. This past week we packed and purged, both the house and garage. However, saying goodbye wasn't the least bit bittersweet. I'm not that kind of person. Perhaps in my younger years I may have allowed myself to wallow in tinges of "what could've been", but that's not who I am now. Before we drove away we did a final walk through the back fields, now hugely overgrown. And I stopped at the graves of Remy, Marbles and Big Zekie to tell them I loved them and we weren't leaving them, because they are in our hearts forever (hey, I'm not some kind of heartless, cold monster!). As we drove out of the driveway I asked Jonathan to stop so I could just check the mailbox one last time. I opened the latch to find a lone card that said, "God Bless You". It was the back of a business card placed there by a landscaper, who noticed the neglect of the property and was looking for a job. There you go, it was our sign of closure for that chapter in our lives. I took it as South Carolina's way of saying, "y'all can come visit, but get outta here and go on home now!" Two years ago right before we drove north we saw a newly applied bumper sticker on the back of a stop sign we passed daily that said, "Yankee Go Home". Okay, okay, we got it!!!! We didn't belong there! We are meant to live in the northeast! South Carolina is in our rearview mirror and it feels just fine to me.
