My phone rang. I knew what the call was, I’d been expecting it all day.
“Hello?”
“Congratulations! The place is officially SOLD!”
I was hit with mixed emotions. Four and one half months to sell it. Five months to pack, empty, and prepare it for sale.
Seven years of memories.
This was our Mom’s ‘dream home’. She loved every inch of the place, including all the God damn stairs. It was a three-level town home (though, I guess, the entry level didn’t really count, but you still had to walk up all the stairs to get to the main living space).
Apart from the stairs, it was lovely. Open concept kitchen/dining/living with very bright, beautiful *white* cabinets. Main floor laundry ROOM! Spacious pantry, powder room, and plenty of storage. A large balcony off the living room that overlooked a small green space with plenty of visitor parking at her doorstep. Upstairs boasted two nicely sized bedrooms, both with a good-sized closet, a generous main bath, and a lovely primary bedroom with great ensuite, and a walk-in-closet.
She loved her home. All this tucked into a cute community across from shopping, 20 minutes from a major city.
We looked at an IDENTICAL unit about 10 minutes from my house (in above mentioned city).
She rejected the unit close too my home… Why?
Dark wood cabinets. She HATED them. Hate may not be a strong enough word. That unit overlooked a large green space, near better shopping, and would have had better access to doctors and the eye specialist she saw every 5 weeks. But NOPE. She would not have those dark wood cabinets.
She’d spent the previous 20+ years in a house with dark wood, and she loved her home with our step-dad but hated the kitchen. There was no talking to her about it.
So, the white kitchen won. She knew when she saw it. It was her house. She couldn’t put a deposit down fast enough. A designer by trade, I helped her pick custom blinds, an upgraded sink, and I think we worked on finishes like paint. We shopped for furniture (not a bed – she took the 30-year-old disaster from the farm – a running and long-standing joke among anyone who ever stayed at the old house and had to stay over in that awful hunk of junk).
Her home was truly her castle. She adored that place and honestly, after we moved her in, other than Christmas at my place, she rarely left.
And now we’d sold it.
I understand, logically, why we had to sell it. None of us want to be landlords. None of us need the house. The only move, to close out the estate, was to sell it.
But it is our link to her. Yes, yes, I understand it isn’t her, but in a way, it was her. It was representative of everything she loved. She loved her home. She loved watching her favourite shows, cuddled up on her couch with her cat, eating Cheezies, smoking cigarettes, snuggled under a ridiculously warm blanket on a summer’s day, neck pillow in place, catnapping. I can see the image right now – as I was often at the other end of that couch, no blanket, typing away on my computer (like I am now), neck pillow in place, often napping along side her.
We watched Star Trek until I could repeat the dialog of the movies and episodes as they ran (classic Trek movies and her favourite Star Trek series was Enterprise). It often drove me a little squirrely that we never really watched anything else, but she said they were like old friends, and she took great comfort in that. Considering my sister and I were her best friends, and she ours, I could appreciate that and watched along with her.
Letting go of those memories – like when my husband deleted the shows off her PVR – was brutal. She was never coming home to watch them again. I knew that I truly did, but it felt like letting go of a piece of her. Like I was letting her down somehow. But he did that. She could be mad at him (she wouldn’t be. She rarely got mad at her sons-in-law. Those boys – the sun rose and set on my husband and brother-in-law).
Selling her home… Letting go of the place she went after she lost her partner of 23 years – I don’t know. It has a different sting to it. Practically, she’d tell me I was being silly. Attaching so much emotion and sentimentality to it.
But I guess the sting is two-fold.
It was also my refuge. Sometimes, I just needed a place to go, and Mom’s was it. Moms was always it. Whether it was the farm or the new house. I always had somewhere to go.
And now I don’t. There is that phrase by Thomas Wolfe ‘you can’t go home again’. Except with Mom’s, I could. It wasn’t my childhood home, but Mom’s was always, always home.
Mom is gone and so is her home.
