Trading Spaces

We sold our house in March. We put it up on the market asking more than we thought we could get for it, and lo and behold, before we can even hammer the FOR SALE sign into the driveway, some guy from Idaho calls and offers full price for it. What idiot doesn't even try to go for a lower price? Well, obviously one who has money to burn. He paid cash. So, though it was great that we sold our house, we consequently found ourselves with a narrow timeframe to find a place to live. My mom said if we didn't find a house, that we would be forced to make do under a bridge. I told her I would come visit her in daylight hours; I would be at my dad's. We searched endless classified ads, toured numerous houses. One thing that I discovered from the process is that rental houses, to put it bluntly, suck. It is human nature to be of the mindest that if you don't own it, you don't have to take care of it. It seems like every rental I walked through either smelled of an unrecognizable animal odor, had orange shag carpet, or had what appeared to be crack-head neighbors. We did finally find an exception to the commonality of rentals, and to my sheer delight, it was in the heart of Hucrest. I grew up in Hucrest and had missed the summer days of rollerblading to Colony for slushies or riding bikes around the neighborhood. As an added bonus, the house was basically brand new, not even a year old. It brought me great comfort to know that I wouldn't be living in someone else's stains and odors.
Well, the moving days arrived. We began moving out of our house on Thursday and were out by Saturday. We gathered our resources of pickup trucks and loaded them one by one, taking load after load after load down the hill, across Garden Valley, down Troost, and to our rental. I felt like a Beverly Hillbilly riding in the back of the truck holding onto a rack of my clothes as my shirts flapped in the wind like flags. We might as well of had a huge flashing light on the truck saying, "Yes, we are moving and were too cheap to rent a moving truck." Anyway, we finally got our house empty. And I was sad. I was sad as my mom scrubbed my brothers' and my heights off of the pantry door. Gage's pencil marks had been steadily climbing. Bryce's started lower, but still continued to climb. I looked at mine for the last time. It was a steady line across the middle of the door. I was sad as I looked at the still unfinished paint spot on our kitchen cieling. The builders had forgotten to paint it. As I stood at the car getting ready to drive down our airstrip of a driveway (my mom placed the reflectors too close together) for the last time, I looked at the house we built just six years ago. I looked at the dent in the garage from Gage driving the Expedition with his permit. I looked at the hole in the garage wall from my mom backing out with the car door still open and Gage hanging on the side. I looked at the chunk I took out of the siding of the house with the power washer. All of these "flaws" in our house were things that the new owners would undoubtedly fix. To me, however, they were funny and happy memories. I looked at our pool for the last time and it really hit me, and for the first time I cried--I wouldn't be able to tan on the floaty chair anymore. JUST KIDDING! I didn't cry at that, although I will miss my days of floating in the recliner floaty chair sipping a smoothie, reading People magazine and getting fried to a crisp. To me, the pool wasn't just filled with water. It was brimming with family memories and an era of our life that is now over. With all these thoughts in my head and in my heart, I stepped into my car, shut the door with thud, threw the stickshift into reverse, and sped on down the driveway for the last time. I didn't look back.
We moved from over 3000 sq. feet to 1500, and if you ever have the chance to look in our garage, you'll find it full of couches, chairs, a big-screen tv, piano, and boxes upon boxes upon boxes. On top of that, we have a storage unit filled to the max. I think my English textbook might be in one of the boxes somewhere....I actually watched a movie in the garage on the first night I slept there. I saw the couch and the TV and thought, "Why not?" I'm sure the neighbors thought the new renters were performing experiments in their garage as the flashing light of the TV filled the garage windows. (I wondered why they don't talk to us.)
So far the move has been quite an adjustment. However, it hasn't been as bad as I expected. I know this is going to sound sappy and overly-sentamental, but like my mom said, "Home is where the family is, not the house." Oddly enough, I found this to be very true. Very true.