Gone Fishing

 

Dear Mr. and Mrs.

I’m not sure we will meet at the closing or not….you know the whole COVID thing.  Just in case I
wanted you to know you bought a good house filled with amazing memories.

Thirty years ago, when we moved to Waco from little Hillsboro, we were a little overwhelmed by all the options for housing, but we kept coming back to that house on Sandalwood.  It was all blue at the time, blue carpet, blue walls, and blue curtains.  We ended up buying the blue house because it just felt right.

This house has sheltered me and mine for three decades.  When we bought this house in 1990 it was a real financial reach for us, but we did it, at my wife’s insistence.  Like so many things, she was right to insist.  She was always smarter than me.

In this house we have loved, laughed, cried happy tears, and cried sad tears.  Our children both graduated from high school, and college while Marty and I lived in this house.  We saw them both married and start their own amazing families all while the “blue house” was our home.

In this house we celebrated and loved our kids and their friends.  We had more than one big kid’s party or gathering in this house.  We loved having them over to our place, it felt safe for them and it felt safe for us.  Young people spent many nights smiling here.  There were tears and teen age loves and break ups and Halloween parties and church Xmas white elephant gift exchanges and birthdays and communions and just family.  This house sheltered all.

My wife finished her doctorate sitting in the dining room working on her dissertation all night and all day.  She sat and played the piano in our living room for hours at a time.  It was her refuge and my opportunity to sing off key and loud. 

Eventually she had both of her strokes in that same living room.

The “blue house” has long since transitioned to different colors with different carpet and different floors.  Our children left and moved on and we added a continuous flow of caregivers, nurses, and therapists to the list of house guests.  Some of those guests became so familiar to us they became family and this house sheltered and cared for them too.

Luckily, the house on Sandalwood evolved very nicely and provided a perfect place for Marty, my wife, to live.  She was in a wheelchair for 14 years and the house worked perfectly.  Little did we know when we originally bought that blue house it would become our refuge from the intensity of chronic care.

This is where we did that, this is where we lived through the midnight ambulance rides, the evening rushes to the hospital and the natural fears of a stroke patient.  Despite the strokes, we eventually began to find ways to laugh and smile and cry and live a full life.  Marty even started playing that little piano again. 

This house, made of brick, wood, metal and wire, was our shelter against all the storms raging around us.

John Denver wrote and sang a song, “This Old Guitar”.  He sings, “It opened up the space for us to be
What a lovely place and a lovely space to be.”  He wasn’t singing about our home, but it fits perfectly for how I feel about this house.  It was the perfect place for us to be for the last years of Marty’s life.  Being in this familiar space gave comfort to me and my family as Marty found another way of being on May 7, 2019.

It feels like it’s the right time for me to walk a new trail.  I’m happy we lived here; it was simply the right house at the right time in our lives.  I hope you have the same feeling for years to come as you fill it with new memories, with new laughter, new smiles, new tears, new life. 

And yes, you will learn how to 3 point turn out of the garage, or you will knock down the fence.  It’s been done before.