When you're closing a chapter in your life and opening another, you find yourself intensely open to many emotions. I’ve spent the last few weeks packing up my family’s life in to assorted cardboard boxes. And while it felt like it took forever to sell our home, in an instant it was sold. So too did packing feel like an eternity only to move out in an instant. During the loading, and even the unloading and unpacking, the weight of what we were seeing in the rear view mirror of life hadn’t hit us. I don’t think I really ‘thought’ about what I was leaving behind until I spent extended time touching up the walls with paint and cleaning up around the empty house.

While structures of houses vary little from one to the next, the stories within those walls, the laughter, the tears, and the memories vary greatly. Those are the elements which make your house a home. And while cleaning these last two days, I realized that each room of my now sold house had many stories. These were the building blocks to the start of a dream; a family full of love and compassion, and a little bit of piss and vinegar.

It’s the seemingly insignificant nuggets over the years which have the greatest collective pull on your heart. Room by room, I kept getting swept up in the emotion while I painted. It was like each hole I patched was a peep hole into something deeper in my family’s existence. In the backyard, I remember building the brick wall around the flower bed while Son #1 was an infant and looked on through his little play yard. In the kitchen, the holes in the wall mark the magnetic board of letters and days of the week. Son #1 learned his alphabet there and how to spell his name. In the great room, the holes held up pictures of our kids in various stages of growth and life. The pictures comforted you in the calm of the late nights as you watched TV.

And the alcove that held the TV, hours of shows, bike movies, and video games were logged there. Friends and family gathered around the fulcrum of home entertainment for Superbowl parties and Cougar football. I think about my office where I spent so many hours working on creative projects and slaved away on my studies to get my masters degree. On the walls, vinyl records of my life changing albums were hung. I produced both videos of the first birthdays of Son #1 and #2 in that room.

The garage was a shelter away from the world much like the office. Son #1 learned to ride a bike and a skateboard there. The wall was tagged with his initials in graffiti. Both Son #1 and #2 scribbled their art work in sidewalk chalk on those concrete floors. Pictures of dinosaurs, cars, monsters, and even family were there at some point. Back inside, I remember putting Son #1 to bed in our bed and counting the ‘stars’ on ceiling from the lamp left to us by his grandmother. I hated to put him to bed in there and only to pick him up and carry him to his room later. What I wouldn’t give to have one night with his limp sleeping body in my arms as I stumbled down that dark hall to his bedroom.

And the boys’ bedrooms have so many memories. I struggled to paint and decorate the room of Son #2. I worried that I wasn’t going to love him like Son #1. While we knew he was miracle baby, we were a slight bit uneasy when we found out about him. The room is the physical ramification of the memory of that internal conflict. I can’t even begin to imagine a life without him now. In the other boy’s bedroom, Son #1 at the ripe age of 21 months stood beside his dad as I painted the Seahawks logo on his window in honor of the team’s first Superbowl. I can still vividly remember the night where I built his crib before we brought him home.

Every room has something; the master bedroom with our framed vows hanging, the words describing our commitment, the bonus room with hours of foosball while my wife was pregnant with Son #1 and tournaments on holiday get-togethers, the torn up back yard from my hyperactive dogs, and the ‘ghosts’ who kept the boys entertained and safe in the entire house. The memories go on and on and the emotions grow and grow.

This was the house that we brought both of our sons home to. This was the house that both knew as their home. Yesterday was more difficult than I thought. It was intensely hard to close that garage door for the last time. I wasn’t coming back later. Ever.

I snapped a few photos in those last few moments in the house. I always wanted to shoot my fake MTV Cribs video there and never got around to it. So many rooms and so many memories are in that house. I feel like I’m letting my family and that house down by closing this chapter and venturing in a new direction. It’s like this edition of the book is complete. It was tough to not shed a tear or two as I walked out of the garage for the last time. I locked the door behind me and left the keys inside. The phone rang. It was my realtor passing on that the sale had recorded with King County. The house was no longer mine. It was officially sold and those memories are now a wire transfer into my savings account.


That was our house. Those were our memories. I can only pray that the new owners take good care of it. We now have to move on and begin to author the next volume in our family history. While the concept of that’s exciting, it’s equally scary and uncomfortable. Still, it hurt to drive away from our old home. So many memories.