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SO LONG HOMESTEAD!

Bill
Employee
Employee

Many of you know that my mother passed away a little over a year ago (to read her tribute click here).  Since then, things have been....well...interesting.  I have a younger brother who is disabled, and I've been making sure he was okay (while maintaining a respectful distance) while trying to sell my parents' home of over 40 years (in which my brother still lives).  Timing of course, is everything--and we unfortunately timed putting my parents' home on the market at the exact same time as the biggest meltdown in the history of  American real estate. 

 

However, after nearly 100 showings, the house has sold.  Thank you, dear friend and real estate agent extraordinaire Sandy T.!  We closed Friday, turned it over Monday, and spent the weekend clearing the house out.  The Officer (my son) and his wife came in for the weekend to help, and other helpers were my son's friends, as well as my best friend Kent and his daughters...and in retrospect, what could easily have been a very melancholy event was surprisingly celebratory.

 

Of course, the move-out was a LOT work.  While we'd moved a few things out of the house during the past year, the bulk of the furnishings Mom and Dad had were still there--and needed to get "placed."  My home is already full of way more furniture than I need, but I took the piano that I struggled for nine years to learn to play (unsuccessfully), as well as a console record player/"hi-fi" radio that Mom and Dad bought in 1959.  They bought it when they returned from their first weekend away from me after I was born--they went to the horse races at Oak Lawn Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and bet on a horse named "Billy Baby's Buddy."  The horse (a longshot) won.

 

Most of the stuff in the house, of course, is very pedestrian...glasswear, old kitchen equipment (including the electric bean pot in which my grandmother used to make her black-eyed peas every year for the reunion in Glen Rose), furniture, and bric-a-brac.  But other things we found were little surprising treasures:  School trophies.  Long-unused fishin' poles.  The satin sheets I bought my parents for Christmas, 1977, at Sanger-Harris (Daddy HATED them--said when they tried them he kept sliding off the bed, which gave me a mental visual I did NOT want to process!)  Pictures, of course....hundreds of pictures, each one a tiny snapshot of my family history.  One very personally important picture book of all of my early travels (I'll share some of those with y'all in a later blog post!). The goofy, weathered first-grade paper I did back in the early '60s that had a hand-drawn picture of the moon accompanied by a child-like scrawl that says "THE MOON IS OUR CLOSEST NEIGHBOR....HELLO, MOON!"

 

The amazing thing about cleaning out the house was not how much work it was (and it was a LOT)...but it was how much love we all felt.  Total catharsis.  Every item, every coffee table, every hidden surprise gave us a little shot of the love that the house had been filled with for so many years.  It also reminded us all of the stock that we come from--loving, sturdy people who refuse to let life's roadblocks get us down.  My mom and dad didn't--neither did Nannie, Mom's mother who raised three kids as a single mother during the Depression.  Nor did Bom-Bom, my paternal grandmother who raised a dozen (!!!!) kids with an abusive husband (my grandfather).  The house I grew up in, the one we just sold, contains all of those memories and values, the trophies and the scars, for better or for worse. And we will treasure all of those things forever.

 

It was a very melancholy moment driving away from the house for the last time Monday evening.  That place has 45 years of family life, trauma, living, and love imbedded it--and I'll never be in that house again.  But while my brother, my entire family, and I have all of those memories secure forever in our heads, it's time to turn it over.  The couple who bought it is a very nice, sweet young couple.  They're first-time homeowners, and will be bringing up their family in the house that my brother and I grew up in.  It was a great place to rear a family.  Joel and Sara will make it a great place to raise a family---again.

 

So goodbye, homestead.  It was great.  Treat your new owners well, please.  And good good luck and Godspeed, Joel and Sara. 

 

2 Comments
blusk
Aviator C
Bill that had to be a bittersweet moment for you. I went through the same thing with my wife and her mother a few years ago. My own mom has been living in the same house since 1967, and its amazing what memories a structure can hold. Hopefully it will be filled with the sound of children making their own memories.
Anonymous3237
Explorer A
Hey Bill, I live in Minneapolis and Southwest has been more expensive on 9 out of 10 flights I have been looking at. If you want to be succesful here, your prices need to be more competitive.