Giving up the House

Imagining myself living in an apartment was not so difficult – after all, I’ve done it twice before – but picturing myself giving up my house was something altogether different. 1306 Linden Green has truly been my home for almost 20 years and I have endless happy associations with living here (I have some not so happy memories of that, too, but that’s not part of this story), many of them connected with my family and my many friends: birthday parties, dinner parties, benefits and celebrations, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween. The house has also become the amber of my life, frozen with art I’ve collected, each piece with its own history, and the many objects I’ve dragged home from my trips. While some of this is transferable, other parts of the house are not. There’s the small stain on the sisal carpet in the dining room, where Fred, my English cocker spaniel, bless his heart, peed when I didn’t get home in time to take him out. There’s the dent in the living room floor where the little marble table fell over when a date and I got too exuberant doing the samba. Fortunately, the marble didn’t break. There’s the spot in the kitchen floor where a beautiful dish fell out of a too-fully-packed refrigerator, smashing into many pieces and spewing the sauce everywhere at a critical moment when I was about to announce a fancy brunch. There’s the touch-latch door in my den that will never close properly, the wall sconce that has to be coaxed to stay lit, the scorched spot on the laminate counter top in the kitchen and the one under counter light that burns for a while, goes out, and then comes back on. There are the so many things that give my house flavor, personality, uniqueness. Sentimental me; I wondered if I could face giving all that up.

In time, I came to realize that this “stuff” is all associated with my past. So I just decided to let all that go. Focus on the future, I said to myself. Think about a whole new way of living, in a whole new environment. Imagine the possibilities, the excitement, the learning. You’ve grown stale, I said. Stretch! Grow! Become!

When I realized I had begun to speak of 532 as “my apartment” (shown in the lead photograph on the top floor between the glass bridge and the vertical construction pylon), I knew it was going to be okay. I put my house on the market.
Stay tuned.