how walls and windows become a home

The day is so close, we’ve been spending our free time staking claim on our new address.  It’s funny how quickly new walls can feel like home.  And every time we turn off the lights and lock the door, our sigh speaks of the growing tug back inside and the weakened desire which greets us upon returning here. 

This place where our lives have happened for one year and nine months. Big moments where our family grew and the forgotten everyday kind too.  The floors where we built towers and played trains and threw fits.  The windows displaying the ever-changing seasons, luscious green, vibrant fall hues, and long, snow globe days of white.  This year, we’ll greet spring through another set of window panes and experience it in the plot of grass all for us.

As cardboard piles grow, pieces of us detach from here, filling boxes with belongings and memories, who slip in through cracks and occupy the extra spaces. And just as quickly as we prepare to leave these walls, the new ones are eager to be ours.  It happens without awareness, new curtains in the kitchen, your favorite soap sitting above the sink, cozy blankets your child love, a new yellow bookcase meriting a squeal in the store.  The trees already studied in a short amount of time,  how one certain branch bends and shoots across in the most poetic way.  Visions of picnics and coffee mornings and dirty, little, chubby hands discovering the world. A delicious resident breeze who merrily sweeps from front to back, whispering, put your desk here.  All of this is how walls and windows start to become a home.

We carry life with us, the good, the bad, and the ridiculous, whatever we remember.

Old and new. 

Endings and beginnings.

All packed into boxes, loaded then unloaded.

Soon, we’ll walk around these hollow rooms and pay our last respects to this place, whispering thank you and good riddance and remember when.

And turn off the lights.

One last time. 

We’ll close door, resign the keys and in a blink, walls and windows cease being a home.