Letting Go of "Home"

My family moved twice while I was in grades 1-8, so I attended three Catholic elementary schools. Making new friends isn't easy when you are gawky, shy, bookish, and "four-eyed." (Those cat-eyed glasses did me no favors.)

When I had children, I vowed that they were going to stay in the same house from the moment they entered first grade through high school graduation. We bought a house in an excellent school district the summer before Pat and Ali started first grade (1988) and remained there until we left for Belgium in 2007. We'd managed to stay put not only until the kids were out of high school, but until they were out of college.

For most of the past three years, while we were in Belgium and then Colorado, we rented our house to a young couple from Germany. When Carolin and Ranier told us over the summer that they were being transferred to California, we decided, despite the horrific real estate market in the Detroit metro area, to put the house up for sale.

The house itself isn't anything architecturally special—it's a big 1970s Colonial typical of the northern Detroit suburbs. However, it backs to a huge, rolling commons area where the neighborhood children ran back and forth on summer evenings like a herd of antelope. During the winter, they all sledded down a hill that I could see from my kitchen windows. Patrick first tried snowboarding—with a cheap snowboard that he strapped on over his boots—on that hill; he and Alison also tried to get our dogs to sit on the toboggan with them (fat chance!) as they glided down the gentle slope. (Merlin and Hana also showed no interest in pulling the toboggan up the hill.)

Although the previous owners had not been big gardeners, we added a flower and vegetable plot at one of the lot's back corners. (The other corner held two identical playhouses on stilts, one for Patrick and one for Alison. Sharing has never been an option for those two.) One spring, when my next-door neighbor Sue and I had three friends between us who were suffering from breast cancer, we channeled our anxiety and fear into creating a shared, peaceful, shade garden in the narrow space between our houses.

We closed on the sale of the house last Thursday.