I can leave as big a mess as I want.....you wanna bet?

So.

yeah.

we ummm, we........

SOLD OUR HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and we're moving, somewhere (over the rainbow) July 25th. which is the weekend after the Fair, and three days before I leave for Camp Hope, and directly from there the two week mission trip.
and we don't have a house to move into yet. which means we'll probably be with my grandparents or someone for a little while. so many unknowns right now, like what to do with my baby (that would be the most beautiful piano in the world), and a new house, and a bazillion other things. I feel happy, but I think I'm only happy because we can finally leave the house and not worry that it's a mess, and it's all done and over with, as far as actually selling the house. but deep down, inside, I still don't want to move. Looking around at the walls that are growing more bare as we pack everything up, I don't like the thought of other people living in my house. All the flowers are blooming and I feel like they're my flowers. It's difficult, especially since when we came here eight years ago this wall all a big forest. We cleared it and built the house with our own hands. I planted these flowers, my flowers, and weeded them on hot summer days like these, for years and years. Our neighbors are my neighbors, and I can't think of them as anyone else's, no matter how much I may not really like some of them. I remember corners we built with our own hands, where I've stubbed my toes and banged my hands, and needless to say my own room has sheltered so many different emotions. The cedar trees in the garden should only be there for our hammocks, and I wonder what kind of books people will read there when we are gone. I remember playing badminton and tag with two wonderful, darling, sweet exchange students over the years, and how this property is the best place in the world for a child to grow up. Making mud pies and "baking" them on the boulders of our amazing firepit. Waiting for the dogwood flowers to open each year, and all the rhodies, and Sweet Williams, and those pretty purple flowers that are really weeds. My coal hill, our deer, those trees my neighbor and I cleared when we were super-bored for four days straight a few years back, and the cuts we got from the blackberry bushes. Making snow ice cream when we had 14 inches of snow, and rejoicing that our yard was so big so we had more snow than so many people. Star-gazing in August when the Perciades are at their peak, in the middle of the night. Finding shapes in the clouds with Katie in the middle of the day, sharing one sleeping bag in the lawn and trying to walk around in it. Those little quirks and unfinished parts of the house that only we know about because we built it. Our house. It seems impossible, both that it should belong to anyone else, and that we should call anywhere else home. I know it's ridiculous, me being so possessive. Someday I'll have to leave so much behind. and I'll only be "home" a couple more years. but, even having it on the market so long, being ready and prepared for a whole year, it still seems too soon. I won't see my own house covered in a deep blanket of snow ever again, and the way it bends the trees down over the driveway like a tunnel. We won't have the deer we've know since they had little white spots all over their backs as fawns running through our yard anymore. Dad can't go hunting just across the street; we can't go mushrooming, or higher up, running freely under the powerlines, or staring at a large bull elk for two full minutes.

It's been a good place to grow up, the best place to grow up, and now we have to leave it. Worse, it will have to be someone else's place. I hope they treat it well.

And I hope I'll get over this and learn to call a new place my own, and that it will be a good place for me to really "grow up," from a girl into a woman.






for right now, my room's a mess, I didn't make my bed, I don't care, and there's nothing you can do about it!