4/52

I definitely dislike change more than the average person. I know this for sure about myself. I often have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into anything that is new and different. Even so, I have to admit that, more often than not, change is for the better... at least eventually. After all, a season that lasts forever most certainly would not be as special as a season that gives way to a new one. This is a good reason for me to never move to Florida. Well, that and the fact that my hair and the humidity there are sworn enemies.

My husband and I moved into our first house eight months after we got married. By the time we found it, we had seen every house in four zip codes that was within our price range -- from new construction to handyman specials and everything in between.

Ultimately, the house we bought was a near exact replica of the three other ones we had looked at in the same neighborhood. By all appearances, it wasn’t anything special and I can’t really explain what made it stand out to us back then. All I know is, the minute we walked through the blue-grey front door with the tarnished brass number 29 on it, it just. felt. right.

I know this is not all that unusual, this feeling of being home. Our Realtor says he can see it right away on his clients’ faces when they walk into the house they eventually choose. In our case, we made it as far as the bottom of the stairs in the basement before my husband and I looked at one another and agreed outloud that we had found our house.

We drove to the parking lot of a nearby office building, conferred for about three minutes with our Realtor and made our offer. The sellers accepted it and somewhere in there someone must have mistaken us for adults because a few weeks later, we found ourselves at a settlement table. signing stacks and stacks of papers and getting handed a set of keys.

I loved everything about that house. Sure, there was plenty to be changed and fixed and painted, and I readily admit I cursed the vintage 1980s white laminate cabinets in the kitchen from the day we moved in -- but there were so many little things to love...

... like how year after year, the little dogwood tree in our front yard signalled the change of seasons with its cheerful pink blossoms in the spring, and shiny red berries in the fall.

Or, how, on the fourth of July every year, we could sit and watch fireworks over the rooftops from our bedroom window and, in the fall, from the same window, we could see red and orange treetops for miles.

How, at Christmastime, when we put electric candles in all of the front windows, it looked like a little dollhouse.

And, I loved how, each spring, we planted the same pink and white impatiens in the flower beds that somehow flourished, despite being the completely the wrong flowers to plant in the relentlessly full sun.

We brought out first baby home from the hospital and sat him in his little infant carrier on the floor of the nursery. “This is your room!” we told him, excited to finally have a real use for one of the extra bedrooms. The baby, of course, just slept. But in that moment, I felt the house smile.

I quit my job to stay at home with the baby and it was then I began to see beyond just our little house, to the neighborhood surrounding it -- two hundred or so little dollhouses just like ours, connected in groups of six.

It sat tucked away behind an older section of town, scattered amidst an unspoiled oasis of woods and wide open grassy spaces. You’d never know that just on the other side of the woods was the busiest nearby road to points east and west. In fact, outside in the afternoons it was almost eerily quiet, with only the birds, the mail truck and the occasional lawnmower breaking the silence. On nice days, I would walk the baby around the block pointing out birds and trees, doggies and butterflies along the way.

A year or so passed and I was vaguely aware of a few other moms and babies who were outside sometimes. Being painfully shy though, I knew it would probably take one of those moms throwing herself in front of my car before I would ever introduce myself.

At the same time, not even consciously considering the moms across the street, my most frequent prayer request went something like, “God, please send me some girlfriends who get me and also, just so you know, when you do this? You will need to make it REALLY obvious that they are the ones you have in mind.”

If you don’t think God has a sense of humor, you really do need to hang around with me for awhile. Wouldn’t you know, one of those moms actually DID jump out into the middle of the street and flag me down one afternoon?

After I slammed on my brakes and rolled down the window, she peeked in and introduced herself. Her name was Beth. She asked if I wanted to meet up at Panera the next morning for breakfast with all the other moms and their kids.

It took every bit of courage I had, but I made myself go to that Panera the next morning with my two-year-old in tow. And that is where I FINALLY met the group of women who would become some of my most dear friends and my sanity’s saving grace.

Around 4p.m. on any weekday when the sun was shining and sometimes even when it wasn’t, everyone would begin to congregate under the big shade tree in the common area in a veritable explosion of bikes and lights sabers and baby dolls and sidewalk chalk.

The kids loved it because they had complete and total freedom within the boundaries of the common area to the end of the street. The grass where they played most often all but gave up trying to grow underneath the

pounding of all the light-up tennis shoes and bicycle tires.

The moms were happy to have adult conversation and built-in child entertainment during those two hours in the day when the clock always seemed to slow to a crawl before the husbands returned home from. We talked. We laughed. We searched for inspiration about what to make for dinner. We broke up hundreds of fights and kissed even more boo-boos.

The summers were idyllic with sprinklers, waterguns, and warehouse-club-sized boxes of popsicles. And when the long hot days would stretch into evening, the glow sticks and flashlights came out with the lightning bugs.

It was during one of these summer evenings, as a gaggle of children with bare feet and popsicle stained mouths ran circles around all of us, that one of my mom friends looked around at all of us and said, “You know, these are going to be their memories. THIS is their childhood.” I think we all took a mental photograph of our children in that moment. It was so profound and beautiful and TRUE.

And oh, how our little houses smiled upon all of it.

During my most trying times as a mom, those days, those friends... they were like pure oxygen. I tried as best I could to enjoy every moment, to commit every detail to memory, and to somehow slow it all down, to keep it forever.

The dogwood tree in our front yard had not yet welcomed spring when the first house went up for sale.

It was inevitable, really. People don’t buy townhouses to stay in them forever, although the change hater in me had held out hope that we all would. The truth was though, that our families had all gotten bigger and those little houses were bursting at the seams with toys and pets and furniture and children. Also, the real estate market had changed and the bigger, “forever” homes, the ones we had all always talked about together in abstract someday terms, suddenly became a more tangible reality.

The day the very first family moved out, the neighborhood kids all played in the yard just as they always did. The rest of us fought back tears and eventually just let them go when we all looked around the house as it was being emptied out. If I had ever needed proof that the only thing keeping a house from being just four walls and a bunch of echo-y rooms was the family inside, this was it.

Probably the worst part was that the view from my kitchen window was of my friend’s empty house, the very same friend who, four years before, had waved down my van as I drove through one afternoon and turned out to be my answer to prayer.

Of course, time passed as it tends to do and the sadness faded, as it tends to do. Our old neighbors came back to visit now and then and we saw them other places too. No longer neighbors, but still very much friends.

The next house went up for sale and our group lost one more. There were more tears, but at least we but all knew now that it wasn’t the proximity to each other’s houses that made us friends.

There were bets on who would be the next to go. Never once did I think it would be us.

It was a Saturday in January when my husband, the three boys and I were all home at the same time. On this particular day, I had stepped on one too many Legos in the living room, my husband had been on the boys all day to find someplace else to play, and the next door neighbors were throwing one of their weekly drunken football parties outside of our back window.

We sat down and started looking at real estate listings. The very first result that came up was a big stone house with a huge yard, plenty of bedrooms and a playroom. Part of me knew the minute we saw it that it was meant for us. It may as well have had said in big red letters at the top “Tom and Erin’s New House”. I didn’t want it to be true, but I knew it was.

Within a month, half of our furniture and belongings had disappeared into a storage unit and the little house in the little neighborhood that we loved so much and that had loved us back was officially on the market. The for sale sign in my kitchen window was one giant, glaring, in-my-face reminder every day that our house was no longer our home, it was a commodity to be bought and sold.

We did eventually sell it, after a long two months of strangers traipsing in and out of it with their comments and their criticisms and their dirty shoes. The giant metaphor of a moving truck arrived one morning to pack up our house and our memories to deposit them all in our new home. I walked my oldest son to the bus stop at the end of the street and turned around to look back.

In my sight line was the moving truck and our house on one side and the two houses my friends had recently moved out of on the other. I cried on the walk back for the season that I now had no choice but to admit was over.

It is only with the benefit of time and hindsight that we are able to see the purpose of these all too temporary seasons in our lives -- how we got there, where they left us, what we gained from them.

It’s easy to see now that our little house was meant to be our beginning, our safe place, a checkpoint on our life’s road for us to meet the neighbors who would become our treasured friends. Yes, I know now that was its purpose for us and it served us well. We were exactly where we supposed to be for as long as we were supposed to be there.

And the new house? For all the upheaval and change that came with it, it was home almost as quickly as the old one had been and was everything we needed as a family of five. We could breathe again. We could spread out. We could finally stop storing the bicycles and recycling in the laundry room.

It just. felt. right.

Change had struck again and somehow, I had survived. Again.

Maybe, just maybe, someday I will learn to trust it and embrace it.

Then again, probably not.