Goodbye, house

Some of you may know, but my parents are selling their house (www.1257greenoak.com). I've been doing a lot of things to help them clean up, pack their belongings, move furniture around, that sort of stuff. Just recently, though, it really hit me that they are going to be moving, and our beloved house will be in the possession of someone else. I think I had been so concerned that my parents just get it on the market before the real estate in their market goes down (although in the past year, the probable value of their home went up about 10%, so I’m not sure what that means), that I didn’t really think about the finality of it all. The house will be gone.

There’s a difference between a house and a home, right? Sometimes, it’s just a house – a place with a roof over your head, conveniences of living, nice kitchen, all that stuff. But for me, it really was a home – a place that was consecrated by prayers, memories and the formative years of adolescence. We moved into it in 1989, the first residents of the new neighborhood (90% of the units were still being built). So we’ve had it for 18 ½ years. I actually lived in 3 different rooms in that house – my first room was the upstairs room to the north – you could see into the backyard, and over the fence into the neighbor’s yard (they had a pool). In fact, when we first moved and there was still a lot of construction going on, I remember a lone house with a streetlamp in front of it (the other houses had yet to be built), and it looked like a haunted house – like Freddie Krueger’s house. Scary. I spent most of my time in the downstairs bedroom after Joonho left for college. That room was sweet – my favorite room in the house. That was the room I spent most of my time in high school in, except for the year that Danny lived with us. It was in that room that I really learned a lot of my formative lessons about life, faith and myself. I wrote a lot of letters in that room. And I actually lived in the family room for awhile – I slept on a sofa bed during my sophomore year when Danny first moved in and my Grandma was still living with us after Grandpa passed away.

There’s so many memories associated with that place. I remember how James, Paul and Danny would come over a lot – maybe we would make some mix tapes, or pump the new Steven Curtis Chapman album so loud that the speakers would rumble. I remember the night before Christine and her family left for Texas (it felt like the end of an era for some reason), and the night before Danny left after he graduated – the Rangers won the Stanley Cup, James slept over, and it was 104 degrees the next day. I remember shooting countless free throws, about pretending that there were 5 seconds left in the CCS championship game and I had the ball (one can dream, right?). I remember falling in love with Miriam, my senior of high school, and those first few days after we finally started dating when I would come home at 4:30 in the morning after we would spend the night walking around her neighborhood (it was January, BTW, and yes, it was cold!), and how lucky and happy I felt. I remember my last night living in that house – it was the night before I got married, and I took a little walk around the neighborhood at about midnight and ran into Mr. Beech, who was decorating his house with Christmas lights for some reason at that late hour. I just needed to clear my head and ponder my life on my last night as a single man.

There’s this beautiful song that Amy Grant sings – If These Walls Could Speak. I think it captures a bit of what I’m feeling. What would the walls of our house, our beautiful house, say? Do the ghosts of days gone by, of junior high me – flush with self-confidence – or high school me – melancholy and trying to find my place – haunt the corridors? Maybe only for me. I walked around to all of my rooms the other day, and they met me there – probably because I carry them inside me. I looked out that window upstairs, trying to get a glimpse of that Freddie Krueger house, and realized for the first time, that trees in our rear neighbor’s backyard completely obstructed the view. I hadn’t realized it, but I guess trees grow a little in 19 years.