Another bi-fold in another hall
Another era is to set to close. Dawn and I have decided to sell our family home. When she asked me to okay the sale, I stared into the phone and replied with a quiet okay.
This is the house I carried my three-week-old Beau into, brought my Chicky home from hospital to, spent quiet summer Sunday evenings mowing lawns, taught my sons how to hammer nails back into the rickety patio and swung the boys high into the bushes on the swing set their Poppy and I spent half a day swearing at as we put it together.
This is the house that was half of my world. A house that was the only familiar blanket in both Dawn’s and my world when we returned from Melbourne, exhausted from a year of separating.
We spent some time recently cleaning up the house and yard. I sat on the balcony and felt sad and disappointed at letting go again of something so close to me.
As I painted the front fence, I remembered how I had scraped the front of the car on it when we left to go to the airport to leave Sydney. I had gone through the house to make sure we had packed up all our belongings to begin our journey to Melbourne. I went upstairs to survey the empty rooms and was overwhelmed by leaving it behind.
Getting into the car, with blurred vision I glanced over the back seat to two little Bonds jumpsuit-clad smiling babies, not noticing the fence.
It was never a beautiful house, but the creaking floorboards, the cheery sunlit hallways in the morning and the cool breeze at night under the trees made the home we lived in. The mysterious crayon ‘graffiti’ that appeared on walls occasionally from mini phantom artists, the Lego minefield carpet in the lounge room and chasing the boys down the stairs running late for swimming, made the house our home.
Dawn has finally conceded I’m nuts. I have unhinged a wooden bi-fold door that has sacred, dirty handprints from Beau that we chose to never clean off from the small frosted pane of glass in the door. His little fingerprints that were placed there so innocently years ago. I can’t just let that go. Until I have my own home again, that precious relic from the house will be waiting for another hall.
One door closes and I know another always opens. Every time I go through, I know a part of me goes too.
