My Heart Hurts Today

You know... I LOVE this house.

#1 I love the things I have learned here. Who knew I could grow flowers? Who knew I could grow a garden and most of all, who knew I would actually enjoy planting flowers and vegetables???

#2 Who knew that the lack of a dishwasher really was the reason my kitchen was always messy? Having a dishwasher for the first time in my adult life has changed me. I can never again live my life without a dishwasher, I just can't.

I also love this house for the neighbors. For the first time, I actually have friends in my own neighborhood. I have loved getting to know the women who live around me. We share hobbies and crafts and flower starts and cups of sugar and eggs and milk and freindship. We are there for each other if one of us doesn't make it home in time to meet the bus, we are confident that our children have somewhere to go, that is safe and they will be taken care of until we make it home. I am dearly going to miss these friends I have made. I am not naive enough to believe that our relationship will last beyond us moving away. We will start calling less often, stop meeting at the pool, stop meeting at the gym and before you know it you will think "Oh, I had this really great neighbor once, I wonder what happened to her, I haven't seen her in about ten years."

I love this house because I feel safe here. I can go outside after dark and not be afraid. I have never had that in all of my married life, I have always been afraid outside after dark, even just running out to turn the hose off was a terrifying experience for me. Here I feel safe, not just because it is a newer/nicer neighborhood, but because I know I have neighbors who are watching out for me. I am going to miss that because our next neighborhood won't be like this, we lucked into this house and won't be able to afford a house like this again.

I love this house because it isn't ancient. I am not afraid of the electrical wiring. The first house we lived in after we were married... we lived there for eight years. It was in a SCARY neighborhood but oh I loved that little house as well. But the wiring was very very scary. Everytime I came home (yes, literally every time) I would kind of crane my neck and peek around the corner to see if the house was still there. I always expected that ancient wiring to give out and burn my house down. My mom had other worries, she always worried that we would die from carbon monoxide poisoning due to the equally ancient and very gerry rigged furnace.

There are so many things I am going to miss about this house, but I think more than anything else I am going to miss my neighbors. They are wonderful people and I will miss seeing them every day.

That, and the space. I will miss the space, our next house will most definately be smaller LOL