Dear House

Goodbye and Thank You

I want to be the first to tell you: you might get knocked down.

To the ground.

Leveled.

Nothing but an energetic footprint left. I’m not 100% certain of this future, but we’ve been told it’s a very strong possibility with your new owners. I know you will receive this news with straight shoulders because you’ve always been that kind of house—practical, artistic, willing to give yourself back to the land and make some symbolic meaning of it all. You’ve been here for almost exactly 10 years. We moved into you when Eula was 18 months old. Chris built you—entirely by himself—when we were sleep deprived and living out of suitcases in friend’s basements, my parent’s guest house and our tiny yurt. Our budget for you was so tight it’s amazing you ‘became’ at all. We designed your shed roof to reach toward the hill. We wanted you to be in conversation with this land—and you were! Owls would perch on you. Once, a mountain lion hung out on your porch. Weather weathered your wood siding.

For years we had no bathroom door (simply a curtain).

Remember, before we had stairs, when I crawled up and down the loft ladder until my pregnant belly got too big? We had to move our bed into the living room for months until Chris worked hard to add a bedroom.

Remember all of the breakfasts and lunches at the counter with the fig tree watching over everyone?

Remember when we tore down a wall and Chris’ Dad helped lift a beam milled from a resident Doug Fir nto place and I said, “Moe-Daddy, we will forever look at that beam and think of you.”

Remember that snowy May evening when we all slept in piles of blankets on the concrete floor next to Bru-dog the night before he died?

Remember all the warm wood stove nights, the nursing babies in the hammock on the porch, the way toddler Eula used to sit naked on the stoop, scribbling into a journal and telling me that she was writing her book?

Remember the girls slowly growing up past the kitchen counter they used to run under?

Remember the baths in the utility sink before we had a bathtub?

Remember how the girls lived on/for the indoor swing during the pandemic?

Remember when postpartum hormones + sleep deprivation launched me on such epic emotional swings that I would leave you at 3am to drive on dark isolated roads during snowstorms or flatten myself into a starfish shape and ask Chris to lie on top of me and not let me leave. It was one of my lowest moments and you were there for it. I wonder what you thought. Did you get it? Did you judge it? Did you simply witness it?

Remember all the tickles and laughter and hooting and when Eula pointed out your rectangular window and said one of her first words “Tar” for star?

Remember the rain, hail, wind blasting your western side?

Remember the kitchen dancing? There has been so much kitchen dancing.

walls going up, complete for then, before the porch, first ladder climb

Remember each part of you made by Christopher, this man who can make anything and who did it diligently, consistently, like a gentle camel making his way on a long desert journey, not stopping, holding the water for the family, still going, adding bookshelves and co-sleepers (so many of them) and bed-frames and wooden doors with latches and decks and counters.

We dreamed you into being.

But he made you.

He labored to make you.

With his hands.

The very first wood stove fire of many. Papa Christo made it all with his hands.

You are his creation and I honor him for it all. I would have never had the chance to live in a home like this without him and his ingenuity. As we leave, we tumble the no longer needed into the wind, we bury what wants to be buried back beneath your foundation, we sweep our dust out of you and we leave some of our glitter.

We thank you.

You held us.

You watched us.

You were here for our fall and rise and fall and rise and fall and rise into middling.

Have you, readers, left a beloved home before? If so, tell me more.

With devotion,