A New Threshold

I bought a house.

Let me repeat that.

I BOUGHT A HOUSE!!!

After renting for many years, turning the key and stepping over the threshold last night was like opening the best present ever! I see it as a gift to my children mostly… for their stability and future. I have longed for a home we could truly call ours for quite a while. Life hasn’t exactly turned out the way I planned, and I never expected to do this on my own, but I am extremely thankful I could.

 

I bought this house because it felt like home the minute I walked in and my hope is for my kids to eventually feel it is truly home. I want it to become their soft place to land and a place where they can be completely comfortable, living out the daily, as well as our family’s big events and holidays. I can already see them blowing out birthday candles and I have the perfect spot picked out for our Christmas tree. I see them napping on the sofa in the living room and doing their homework at the desk in each of their “new” rooms. I see them playing basketball in the driveway and baking me cookies in the kitchen. I can see it all, knowing not every moment will be perfect, but it will be HOME no matter what.

The park is close, as is the “old school” neighborhood pool and some really good friends. Our church is closer too and the area is even more central than where we were before. The neighborhood is great and there are lots of kids and streets to walk Oliver and rides bikes. I just adore that the seller left me some envelopes with my new return address on the back…

 

What I may love most about this purchase so far, is the short but sweet back story. The seller and I spoke at the closing and she was also a single mother of two boys and a girl, around the same ages as my kids, when she purchased the home many years ago. I could see the glow in her eyes when she mentioned her children and the memories they made together in this house. Her passing it on to me is full of symbolism and sentiment and if you know me at all, you know that is a big deal to me. I am so grateful that serendipity or prayer or whatever providential or heavenly thing was at work, put us together as buyer and seller.

This is a dream come to for me. The home where I grew up has always held so many special memories for me (again, life wasn’t always perfect, but it was good). I want my kids to know the same and I want them to be able to enter into a place awash with feelings of love and true belonging, just as I always did.

Will I stay forever? I don’t know. But I hope to stay for a good while. Obviously, all the plans are not for my making. As I pack boxes again (for the second time in 10 months) I will file away the memories of this little “in between” house and move every last one of them into the “new to us” house, which holds space for all the new dreams and possibilities. And I will try to remember to walk over that threshold with the same excitement and pride as I did last night…