part one: home.

today we closed escrow on our first home.

i am everything about it. i am the loss, the depth, i am the shallow, i am the commas, the period, the question mark, the exclamation point all in one. i am the spectrum of colors, i am roygbiv, i am the joy, the gain, the heavy, the light, i am all of the altars we made, the prayers we prayed, the longest of exhales, all the tears we shed. if i had to pick one word, one feeling to describe it all, to label this box in black sharpie, to print this chapter in a fancy font, it would read: grateful. 

i continue to ask myself what is a house? what is a home? so much. so much is a home. our home. i want to write all of it down, i want it to be in one short form, one map, one poem, one song. i am finding (in my research) that a home is where we define our first stories, where we edit, cut, paste, change, shift, grow, die, birth ourselves, our childhood, our adulthood, our motherhood. it's a beginning, it's an end, a backdrop, a bed, a soup. a home is cupcakes, silver, a floral tea cup with a broken stem. a home is a place, a feeling, a smell in the morning, a sound in the night, a body. a home is sauteed onions, garlic and olive oil.  

as a little girl, a home was chandeliers, limoges, amber glass, anger, broken mirrors, walk-in closets, a foyer, fancy parties, lazy susans and pianos that played on their own. a home was toasted plain bagels with whipped cream cheese in a plastic tub, sliced thin tomato with thick ribbons of bright orange nova on top. a home is where i learned about beauty, the good and the bad. it's where the mirror went from dear friend to confusing & complicated. a home was big and grew bigger over time. a home was so many things.

in our story, a home was hope. it was a marriage, a beginning, a wedding, conception, birth, midwives, doulas, wood toys, a miscarriage, growing bellies, paintings, gatherings, breast feeding. it was my husband's pride, it was what you did to begin your story, it was a start to so much more. it was the top of the mountain, the view, the vastness, the definitions of who and what we were, how to live a life, how to create a day, how to turn on the fire, how to nourish all the broken bits. in time, our home became white knuckles, desperation, unpaid bills, shame, vulnerability, loss, a desire to run and never come back, an unraveling of the cellular structures from which we came, a garage full of fabric, seven years of 1-800 calls, strangers coming to the door, taking pictures, almost losing hope, then gaining hope, then losing it, then gaining it until finally we let hope go all together. 

the day we let go of hope, our new story could begin.

as we take the key off the key chain and leave it in the drawer for this new family, i feel grateful for their new beginning, their new life together and the family they are creating. so many new stories just waiting to be createdxxxx

::: this is part 1 of a series about home :::