You guys, I’m working through something here (aren’t I always, though? I KNOW). The house that Paul and I grew up in is under contract. This is a relief, but it’s also a little like, Oh, hi! You’re buying my youth! Here’s what goes through your head when you sell the house your parents built, raised you in, sent you off from, and continued to live in altogether for thirty-seven years: You remember that it’s the house where you played catch with your dad, begging him to throw the ball up high because it was more fun to catch it that way. It’s where you and your brother used hammocks as swings, threw yourselves into piles of raked-up autumn leaves, and willed your sleds down the slight incline at the side of the property anytime it snowed. You walk around the perimeter of the property and you can see the memories play out in front of you, like thirty-seven years ago was as recent as yesterday. You remember the smell of the sheets your mom hung on the clothesline on the warm days…
It’s Wednesday of last week, and I’m writing this to you from a pool deck along the ocean in North Carolina. We’ve turned an idea to get away over Columbus Day weekend into a week-long stay in an oceanfront home in Corolla. We took the kids out of school for the first extended time ever, because David found this house, a re-book, through an internet ad, and it came with a pool and a private walkway to the beach and clean linens already on the beds when we got here, and we didn’t have to go anywhere else but where we are, right now. As I write this, on Wednesday of last week, I do not know that this time next week, we will be sequestered in our own house for fourteen days because Pennsylvania will have added NC to its quarantine list two days before our return, and I’m glad I do not know this, because right now it’s a sunny 78 degrees and Quinlan is on her dad’s shoulders dunking a basketball into a poolside hoop while Saoirse and Cian try–…
As I type this, there is an estate sale company in my mother’s house, sorting through her belongings. The estate manager called me from where she stood in my parents’ dining room this morning to ask me some questions, and when she looked outside, she paused our conversation. “It’s just beautiful here!” she said. “This is a lovely home.” I hung up and cried. I need to tell you about this past weekend. We’d decided to do some sort of Fun Family Fall Activity, and Quinlan really wanted to go to a place with a corn maze, so after we finished cleaning the house Saturday morning (Cian: “Why do we hafta keep cleaning the house all the time? It’s just going to have to get cleaned AGAIN.”), we drove to an apple orchard about thirty minutes south of us. We handed over the bonkers-expensive entrance fee, donned our masks, and made our way to the corn maze after dodging a small handful of social media influencers in their Instagram Hats as they teetered out of a pumpkin patch. All Quinlan wanted to do was…
