Goodbye

We finally sold my old house and the new owners move in today.  When I built this house with my late husband it was my dream home; a stone cottage with a little bit of land where I planned to plant beautiful gardens, grapevines, and fruit trees.  We built it for us, and we had plans to live there forever.  We envisioned ourselves growing old and gray there and having the grandchildren over to spend the night where their parents once slept.  When we started the plans we had one child and during one of our meetings with the builder I mentioned that I wanted at least four bedrooms because I planned on having 3 or 4 children.  He laughed and said something about me getting ahead of myself and then incorporated 4 bedrooms into the plan, with the possibility of the basement holding another bedroom someday if we needed it.  This house was all me.  I really loved the idea of an old farm house but we knew that they weren’t real practical or reliable so we decided to build a new house with the feel of an old farm house.  It has three stories with a 3^rd floor attic room because I always wanted a house with an attic. For me, attics conjure up images of forgotten memories and secrets and I love old stuff like that.   All of the bedrooms were upstairs and the downstairs felt like a 100 year old house with very distinct rooms, not the open floor plans that most people favor today, which did cause some difficulty in attracting the right buyer.  I have a bit of an old soul and I had “old grandma” (as Ryan affectionately calls it) wallpaper in the den with big beautiful flowers, textured walls throughout the main floor, antiques splattered throughout the house, and ivy growing up the sides of the exterior.  I never thought I’d leave so I didn’t take into consideration that someone else might not like my taste.  I just did what made me happy.  But life had a different path for me than one that ended at Baylorpond Court.  Initially in the process of getting the house ready to sell we kept my creative touches because it was just too painful to have Ryan or anyone go in and rip it all out.  Creativity was one thing that was able to often occupy my mind so that I didn’t have to constantly dwell on the cancer aspect of our lives. My daughter’s room had a beautiful hand painted motif that I designed during the months leading up to discovering Jason’s brain tumor, and in the baby’s room I had created this unique wallpaper tree with colorful leaves and sparrows and the verse above it, “His eye is on the sparrow, for I know he cares for me.”  I would look up at this verse of the wall and be reminded of God’s faithfulness as my newborn lay asleep in the crib next to me and my husband slept in the master bedroom across the hall,  too exhausted to move anymore from the effects of multiple rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. This house also had Jason’s touches all over it. He, after my coaxing, signed up for a one day stone laying class and proceeded to do all of the stonework on the front of the house and for the fireplace in the family room.  He built the deck, painted the whole house, and did work in the basement with very limited eyesight due to the tumor’s effects.  Granted, he was not a handy man but he was very determined. So, while I appreciated his efforts to make our house what I envisioned, I now appreciate my new husband’s ability to fix it all! The gardens were the hardest to leave because they are finally looking absolutely as I had always dreamed.  Eight years of blood, sweat, and tears, and today they are exactly as I wanted them.  They became my sanity and my therapy during the summer of 2010.  I had this spot that I called “Jason’s brain” where I would head to whenever we received bad news.  It was a small circular flower batch surrounding a beautiful pear tree, and I would imagine that it was Jason’s brain and every weed that I could pull out was a cancer cell.  I remember getting so frustrated one day that I just broke down sobbing because no matter how hard I tried I could not pull every weed out of that patch.  Today, June 1, 2012, I say goodbye to the stone cottage on Baylorpond Court that held my memories, my hopes, and my dreams for 7 years and in doing so I remember it’s just a house.  It’s built of sticks and stones as every other house. The truly important things in life I have all around me in my new home. I welcome the new memories, the new hopes and the new dreams of a new path God has put me on.  Life is a journey, the good and the bad, and we can accept and embrace, and venture onward or I guess we just get stuck. I’ve decided to keep going.

Just keep livin!!