Dear 2903 Davidson,

No one needs twelve rosebushes. No one. You bled heat in the winter and in the summer you clutched it so tight that it felt as though you were built on a vent of Hell, itself. Your windows were stupid and in all the wrong places. Your backyard was eternally unruly and unmanageable, and I think that secretly you laughed at our pitiful efforts to tame it.

I held a memorial for my father within a month of moving in. I placed my mother’s ashes next to his 9 months before moving out. In between my children grew mostly up, we marked their progress on your kitchen wall. I grew mostly up there, too, my progress was marked in subtler ways – an endless number of sleepless nights, of watching the world dawn morning through your kitchen window, of occasional refuge taken in your back bathroom. Sometimes it was the only place in the world where I felt safe.

We went from homeschoolers to public schoolers to unschoolers, mostly in your dining room. The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and even the Great Pumpkin were frequent visitors, until they weren’t anymore. I spent one summer sending the kids out front to play so I could sneak cigarettes around back. Every May people would stop their cars out front to take pictures of the clematis vine. (It was fucking gorgeous.)

Nicky got a fork stuck in the bottom of his foot once, while carrying his dinner dish from living room to kitchen. (“Stick a fork in it, it’s done” will never have quite the same meaning.) Khy grew up across the street from his best friend. Stormy never wanted to live there in the first place, but she eventually came around.

They all three gave up their training wheels, eventually.

Your deck was the perfect place for that above ground pool we finally bought, and in that way we made our truce, you and I, over the summer heat. I miss your soft carpet. I miss the Lazy Susan style cupboard for canned goods. I miss the black linoleum in the kitchen that never, ever looked dirty. I miss the smell and feel of home.

But I won’t miss the rosebushes. Not at all.

All right, all right. A few eagle-eyed commenters that don’t like to play by the rules have revealed the true meaning behind the clues. And while traveling to exotic locales, zombie hunting and selling hippie children to fund world saving endeavors were all very, very close, the truth is that we’re moving across town. (Kind of anticlimactic, huh? Wait ’til I break the news that I don’t actually have the right to give away Paris.)

Well, it might not be world ending or life changing for you, but for me it’s been a pretty big dealio. Our current house and I have had our disagreements from time to time, but this has been my kids’ childhood home. They were 6, 4 and 2 when we moved in here, and now they’re 15, 12 and 10. Sure, they still have some growing to do, but no one is toddling about anymore. This was it, this was the place where all that happened. Lost teeth, bicycles without training wheels, summers swimming in the backyard, scribbles on the walls when Mom wasn’t looking, birthday parties and memorials, too – we did eight years of growing here. Leaving it behind is breaking my heart a little.

I’m going to continue to be a bit sketchy with the details because (for a blogger) I know how to be discreet, but you can’t really know how this all came down inside my head without knowing that less than a month ago moving was the farthest thing from our minds. This was an entirely unexpected turn of events, and also, I need to add, not due to anything we’ve done. We are rockstar renters. You wish you could be as good as we are at renting. But circumstances did what they sometimes do, and we had to make some changes accordingly. And rather quickly.

Luckily we did, however, almost immediately stumble across something that feels like a perfect fit. In fact, the new place has even more living space than our current house does, and in an arrangement that feels like it will suit our needs much better. Like anything, there are trade-offs, but luckily it seems like everything we’re having to give up are things that I didn’t really like having all that much anyway.

Once we have the keys and I can take some real pictures I’m sure I’ll be talking new apartment here very soon. Right now, though, all is chaos and boxes. I’m actually crazy proud of us and what we’ve accomplished around here in such a short period of time. Even in a rush we’ve sorted through everything – and that is 2 car garage worth of everything, tucked away by a husband whose super power is getting a ton of things to fit in places where, by all that is natural and holy, they should never be able to fit.

This is the corner where everything that we’re taking with us goes.

This is the corner for all the things that will go into the garage sale.

It’s been difficult, though, the worst by far being the several nights I spent sorting through boxes of things that belonged to my father. Things we tucked away 8 years ago in anticipation of a day when I would feel strong enough to deal with them. The irony is that a year ago I could’ve sorted through all of it pretty easily, but now that Mom is gone, too, it’s all become poignant and painful and terribly heavy again. The love letters and greeting cards were hard to take, of course (Dad, hoarder at heart, kept every single greeting card he ever received. I, child of a hoarder, was compelled to sort through every last one.) But probably the most painful of all was a completely random post-it note pad. Half-used, the top-most sheet had a note in my mother’s handwriting promising a quick return from a jaunt to Safeway. Something about just how ordinary everyday it is seems to be what makes it so sad.

This is another thing that marks this house, our time here has been book-ended by deaths. Dad died two months after we moved in, Mom died 10 months before we left. Our new apartment will be the first place I’ll live that neither will see.

I’m 38 years old today, and continuing to do the best that I can. I think this fresh start will be a beautiful thing, and I’m excited to begin the next stage of my life. But, like any change that’s worthwhile, it hurts like hell, too. I would probably curl up in a little ball if I thought about it too much, but right now? I have too much packing to do.