moving

It's true.

We're moving.

In fact, we've kind of already moved.

Out, anyway.

Just 10 years ago we drove up to The Little Yellow House for the first time as ours. Our home.

I was a young mom-- only 2 months past my 23rd birthday, to be exact-- with a talkative 2-year-old son, a curly-haired and softly dimpled 1-year-old daughter, and a belly swollen large with another baby due in early January. How blessed I felt by this house! We had scoured internet listings and even sent family to look at a few places for us, including places to rent, and nothing fit the bill for what we needed in terms of space and dollar-figure. Then this place came along without even making it officially onto the market, thanks to my mom's friendly praise of the work a retired couple was doing to fix it up.

It was and has been a place for us to steward, cherish, enjoy, and share.

There are parts of it that are very much like when we first walked into it 10 years ago, and other parts that are vastly improved (or so we like to think, anyway). It has grown with us and we with it... and now it will go on without us.

On Saturday, along with the help of so many dear family and friends, we packed up all our belongings.

The house now feels very, very empty.

And beautiful! I do love the bones of this house. The woodwork and floors and doors and windows stand out even lovelier without furnishings than with. Saturday after we finished moving everything and Daniel and I dropped off the U-Haul, we stopped back to tidy a few things up and I just walked through the rooms.

So many cherished memories made here!

I know, I know... It's just a house. Just walls and roof. Just wood and stone.

But it has been a basket, a cradle, for so very, very much life.

We've laughed, cried, fought, forgiven, learned, shared, and grown in this house. I think of small group gatherings, the big sitting room filled with young adults eager to discover more of who Christ is and would have them be. I think of Christmas Eve dinners with three large tables all full to bursting with family and childlike anticipation so high among us that it is almost palpable. Late evenings with half-empty tea cups and the crumbs of scones or muffins on paper napkins, candle wax pooling on the tablecloth as we enjoyed one another and others. Baby showers, CFA moms meetings, farewell parties, let's-get-to-know-you dinners, premarital counseling, birthday parties. I am grateful for the nudging of the Holy Spirit to host our own Easter dinner this past spring, a precious opportunity to celebrate His resurrection with the nations quite literally represented around our dining table.

And oh! the wiffle ball games everyday for years and years-- and figuring out the best place in our not-so-large-yard for home plate. Countless dinners of simple soup and bread at the end of weary days, candles lit, shadows blocking out the piled laundry and dishes. The lightbulb moments when-- aha!-- a child learns how to read, right here in this house. Canning applesauce, freezing cherries, burning bacon. Painting a room only to not love the color but have no money right then to paint it again and learning that there are bigger things in life than what color the walls are. Washing dishes and watching the cattails blow in the breeze like waves of the ocean on a warm summer day.

I brought five babies home to this house.

It's just a house.

But it's been a home.

We are excited for what lies ahead. The handiwork of God has been so richly upon this entire process. We're not in the new home yet, but we will get there. Soon I will try to write about all that.

But for now, a farewell to The Little Yellow House.

Thanks, God, for giving us such a special place to spend these past 10 years.

That house was a perfect house

whether you liked food or sleep or story-telling

 or singing or reading or

just sitting and thinking best,

or a pleasant mixture of them all.

Merely to be there was a cure for weariness.

- J.R.R. Tolkien