Homesick

Two days before my baby boy was born, we went to an estate sale. That summer, there had been a big one in our neighborhood, and I had found friendship with the man who ran them on our morning walks. Mr. Stover was preparing for the sale for a while that summer, organizing boxes in the garage, while Annie and Kit were happy in their wagon, and I was red-faced and tired of being pregnant. Henry was due just a week or so after Mr. Stover’s birthday, and we bonded over that. As we stood in the morning heat, he told us stories of his own mother giving birth to him in a hospital with no air conditioning. He said his dad brought a bucket of ice and a box fan into the delivery room to help. I told him that sounded like hell, pardon my language.

Then, there was an estate sale a few houses down from that first one. A tan brick craftsman, stately and warm…a house my husband had loved for months at that point. The house was for sale, and he had poured over the listing pictures at night, trying to convince me what it would be like if we bought it. But the pictures weren’t the best…they were dark and oddly angled. And I didn’t feel the need to leave the house I love quite yet. And so some nights on our walk, after listening to his ideas for this house I didn’t want, I’d huff off in frustration, in stubbornness.

But the estate sale…oh, do I love an estate sale.

Our last appointment before Henry was born was at 8:30 an hour up the interstate. And with all the whispering around town over this house, I knew I had to see it before everyone else had had their take. So I asked kind, kind Mr. Stover if he would let me stop by before we left town. And so very generously, he said yes.

That morning, we drove down the street and were shocked to see people sitting on the front porch already, people waiting in their cars drinking energy drinks as if here for a race. We parked across the street and decided to wait until it properly opened, afraid to go up there and ask to come in early in front of all these people. I didn’t want to put him in that position. But then Mrs. Stover came and knocked on Price’s window. “Come with me.”

We went in through the back door and into the little square kitchen with blue stripe wallpaper and linoleum brick floors. To the right was a small breakfast room with shelves of glassware and copper pots and dishes, two walls of warm windows. Mrs. Stover weaved her way back to the front, calling out, “Take your time!”

Which, sadly, we couldn’t do. We had to hurry, look quickly and without much studying. I was there for quilts and dining room chairs. I started making my way through the house, feeling this since of warmth like honey, like I was in someone’s childhood. The windows were golden with morning, and the house felt cozy, despite the size. Upstairs, there were five bedrooms, all with doors to one tiny landing. It reminded me of the house I lived in until the fifth grade, all of us asleep in a little circle of rooms, our golden retriever asleep on the shag rug in the middle. Every room felt soft, with old lace on the windows looking over the river on one side, the neighborhood we love so much on the other. Then I stumbled upon the tiniest room, with wooden wainscoting and yellow floral wallpaper on the walls and ceilings. It felt as though Andy from Toy Story would live in that room, and I held my Henry through my belly, smiling at the thought. Kit and I had watched the first three that week.

We bought two quilts, a floral wedding ring and a pink patchwork, and a set of maple twin beds. We paid and the Stovers let us leave our trash bag of quilts with them until after the appointment, convinced Henry would be here that day. My suitcases were in the trunk; I was convinced, too.

When we got outside and back in the car, it was silent for a moment or two. Probably Price waiting for what I might say, not wanting to stir me up if I didn’t feel the same as him. Then simply, “I could tell that home was loved.” We called my mom to report our findings, and I told her how the listing pictures hadn’t done it any justice at all. That the house was warm and homey and beautiful. So beautiful. So much potential for somebody one day. But anyways. And on we went.

My doctor sent me home with no news of Henry’s arrival, just a “see you soon!” for next week, instructions on where to park for our induction that we didn’t end up needing.

When we got back, we loaded Kit and Mom up and walked through the house again. I looked closer this time…the yellow room with yellow trim upstairs, the sunroom with a fireplace I hadn’t seen the first time, the shed that looks like it’s sat by the Rhode Island sea since 1973.

Henry was born that weekend, as everyone at the estate sale had guessed, and life moved on slowly for the next month or so. But our home down the street, this home I cherish, started to close in on me. I couldn’t keep up with the housework, with the cleaning and the laundry and the clutter. Which, of course, could be accounted for being merely healed from childbirth with two babies at home, alone for most of the day. But also, as hard as it was to admit, it was because of our Jack-and-Jill home, where every corner was already filled and there was no room to add another life. Things didn’t have places to go anymore…people didn’t have places to go anymore.

Price started adding a tiny strip of road to our walk every night, a road that went down the side of the estate sale house, with a view of the hydrangeas and the rock path Ms. Lucille surely laid. She and her family go to church with us; she and her daughter sit on the aisle across from us. They had moved there in 1965, when her baby girl was just around Kit’s age now. Since the sale, the house had come to life in my mind, little thoughts of their family living there, what it once was. I thought about it in terms of names and history and childhood, not just the house at the end of the street.

The house sat dark as we walked by it, empty windows and leaves on the porch and in the drive. I thought about 1965, babies running the circle of downstairs: kitchen, sunroom, hallway, living room, dining room, kitchen, and round and round again. I thought about porch lights and lamplights and golden warmth from the windows at night, signs of life.

By the end of August, I told Price we could go see it, but if I’m not lying to myself, I knew we’d make an offer, showing or not. We went just at around five o’clock one Monday, the only voice ringing throughout the then empty home the voice of our realtor, who thankfully is also a friend. I took pictures, tons of them, knowing we’d go back home and want to dissect everything again after the babies went to bed. I felt sick to my stomach and the deep, deep and urgent need to cry. But at the same time, I felt a sigh of relief. Here it was…home.

We’ve been dreaming of this home that was to be ours since our offer was accepted in September. On our walks, we peer in the windows and push the wagon through the grass. I’ve carted the babies over there for hours in the morning, meeting with electricians and painters and sheetrockers and carpenters, playing on the porch with Kit and the acorns while we waited for their assessments.

We sold our house within two days of anyone knowing it was for sale. And we’ve just been waiting for the domino to fall, for everything to line up just so.

As I’m writing this, I’m surrounded by cardboard boxes with construction paper taped to them, instructions on where to go and what you’ll find inside. But when you read this, my precious little cottage will sit empty.

I feel in a way that I’m losing a cherished member of my family, the home to the most important years of my life. Where I grew my babies and brought them home, where I danced to Martina McBride and Earth, Wind, and Fire with Kit in the kitchen, where I’ve spent days’ worth rocking my babies in the nursery we wallpapered ourselves, where I’ve written and read and cried and became the mother and wife and daughter I am today.

I don’t know what I was thinking when we bought this house, really. It’s entirely too small for a family even with just one baby. The finances didn’t make sense, the size didn’t make sense, the future didn’t make sense. But I loved it, and I saw our life here, mine and Price’s. And I just hoped for the rest.

I remember nighttimes at the cabin we rented while we renovated this house. Price and I would lay in bed, listening to the interstate just yards away, and I would ask him what he was looking forward to most to moving in. We always talked about Saturday mornings, about a pot of coffee and a pie plate of cinnamon rolls and taking our time.

And now, we’re asking each other the same thing. The answers so similar, just with more lives involved, more space. With a breakfast room drenched in sunlight, a study with lamps on the dining table for coloring and crafts and reading, a yard with a picket fence built by hand, a basketball hoop out the back door. I dream about the tiny wooden wainscoted room that my books and my desk and my journals will live in, where I will write a book and sew quilts and write letters to my babies. I dream about the tiny laundry room upstairs, where the baskets won’t have to travel far and the smell of detergent will drift into everyone’s bedrooms. I dream of the tiny rock paths laid throughout the edges of the yard, where fairies live. I dream of the sunroom in the winter, a fire lit and a show playing from a TV tucked away in a wicker hutch. I say a prayer of thanksgiving that this is the home my babies will remember, that, God-willing, my babies will bring theirs home to one day.

This home we’ve left isn’t one Kit will remember, much less Henry. But in my mind, it was mine and hers, where she taught me how to be a young mother, where we listened to podcasts and folded baby clothes together, where we napped with our faces inches from each other every day, spent hours reading on the front porch, waiting for Daddy to come home. I don’t think I’ll be able to drive this street for quite some time. I don’t think I can imagine, much less see, someone else’s life here, in this home I’ve made.

I told Price before we made an offer that my fear is that the first night away, I’d feel so homesick, I’d desperately want to go home.

I am not as scared of that anymore. Enough time has prepared me. This home we’re headed to feels so familiar, so prayerful, so settled, so God-given. Really, I’m homesick for there already

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