Bittersweet Bubbye

OK, so this picture might seem a little odd so let me explain. We're moving! This is Jason pointing to the beautiful exposed beams on the kitchen ceiling and waving bub-bye. Tessa seems a little perplexed in the background but it's her daddy and he does weird things all the time so whatever.
I don't really know how to take it all in. Night after night lately Jason and I have sat up talking about how wonderful this place is. How we've changed it and how it's changed us and how no matter where we go or what we do this will always be our first house. It's the setting for our engagement (in the front yard under the tree during a blizzard), where I told Jason I was pregnant (sitting on the couch in front of the wood stove), it's where I labored for the first 12 hours, the first house Tessa came home to, where Percy has spent the majority of her 4 1/2 years, where we've had more than a handful of holiday dinners and celebratory meals. It's where we've both gotten to know each other and ourselves in all our ever changing roles; as husband and wife and mama and daddy and breadwinner and child-raiser. Don't get me wrong, we've frozen our tails off in this house, we've burned money in last ditch efforts to appease the old spirits that let us sleep here (believe me their presence is strong and does not go unnoticed).
We joked for the first two years that we felt like pioneers who embarked on this journey out of both naivete and a kind of wanderlust. It sounds counter intuitive, we wanted to explore and so we settled down, but we found and saw and learned things about creating home-space and being a part of history. I love this house and before I even leave it I miss it. The warmth of the wood stove, these salvaged bowling alley counter tops, the porcelain farm sink we drove down to the seacoast to pick up, the old fireplace in the kitchen, the creaky floors, the antique-y door latches in place of knobs, the beams in the kitchen.
We're so good at romanticizing the past that we've begun it before we've even left it behind. This house has been more than a backdrop it's been an active character in our story. A protagonist and antagonist at once. We wrestled with it's quirks and it's thrown mirrors in our faces. It's humbled us and our egocentric minds thinking we could just move in and move out; that we wouldn't wholly change ourselves, our lives before we left.
Four years, three months and three days we'll have had this house. Or rather, it's had us.