We moved out of our house this week.
I want to say that sentence again, slowly, because it still doesn’t feel entirely real: we moved out of our house this week.
Twelve years. Twelve years of living, loving, breaking things, fixing things, breaking things again, and deciding some things just weren’t worth fixing. Twelve years of a house that started out as two people and a lot of square footage and ended up as something I don’t have a word for yet. Something between a home and a heartbeat.
We moved in as a couple. No kids. High hopes. A sitting room we didn’t know what to do with and a backyard that was mostly ambition and crabgrass.
We moved out as a family. Loud, chaotic, slightly feral, deeply loved. The sitting room had become a playroom. The guest room had become a schoolroom. The junk room — and every house has a junk room, don’t pretend yours doesn’t — had become a library. The backyard that was once mostly ambition had become host to a swingset, a trampoline, and a sandbox that I am fairly certain still contains a small civilization.
We got exactly what we prayed for. Every single bit of it.
Now, I want to be honest with you about what two Wild Things can do to a house over the course of a decade, because I think it’s important that you understand the full picture.
The eldest Wild Thing once ripped a bookshelf off the wall. Not a bookshelf that was leaning against the wall. Not a bookshelf that was loosely propped up and waiting for an excuse. A bookshelf that was bolted to the wall. Bolted. With hardware. He was looking for a missing toy. He found it. The wall — not so much.
They both paced back and forth on our knee wall like tiny, unhinged sentinels. The swingset required monthly repairs because the eldest swings with the kind of commitment that suggests he believes he can achieve liftoff if he just tries hard enough. He has not achieved liftoff. He has, however, achieved the rank of superior swing master by the nice man who built the swingset and came out monthly to repair it.
The house absorbed all of it. Every crayon mark, every scuff, every mysterious dent in the drywall that nobody will confess to. It took everything those boys had and it held.
We planted a peach tree on Honey Doodle’s first Mother’s Day after a long struggle with infertility.
It was a twig. A hopeful, fragile, embarrassing little twig that required a support stick just to stand upright. The first time our eldest noticed it, he walked over and shook it the way only a two-year-old can — with his whole body and zero regard for consequences — and Honey Doodle and I exchanged the look that parents exchange when they are certain their child just remodled their back yard.
Shockingly, the tree didn’t die.
On the day we moved out, our boys climbed up into that peach tree and picked peaches. The same tree our son once tried to shake into submission is now big enough to hold him in its branches.
I’m not going to tell you what that means to me. I think you already know.
There was an office off the living room where I started my business. I sat in that room on days when I had no idea what I was doing and days when I was fairly certain I did. It wasn’t much, but it was my little corner.
The boys had the greatest bedroom in the history of childhood. It was enormous and it was theirs, and they turned it into an imagination kingdom. Sometimes it was a pirate ship, others it was a castle, and more recently, it was their place to go and talk about the sorts of things little boys talk and laugh about that make parents cringe.
We brought two perfect children home to that house.
We mourned three babies who didn’t make it in that house.
We sheltered inside those four walls during a pandemic that was very real to those of us with chronically ill family members, and we learned things about humanity during that time that I wish we hadn’t had to learn. We learned who our friends were. We learned who we could count on. We learned that some people will surprise you with their grace and others will surprise you with their selfishness, and that both lessons are valuable, even when they hurt.
We learned that peace and quiet are overrated. That there is a particular joy in chaos that you cannot manufacture and cannot replicate. That the noise of a full house — the arguing and the laughing and the running and the inexplicable crashing sounds from rooms you’re not in — is not something to escape. It is something to be grateful for.
I once wrote in this column that home is not a place. It’s a person.
I believe that more now than I did when I wrote it.
That house was never the walls or the roof or the backyard or the peach tree or the swingset or the library that used to be a junk room. It was Honey Doodle making the schoolroom work on days when she was running on empty from medical issues. It was two Wild Things who loved each other fiercely and expressed it primarily through wrestling. It was the four of us, figuring it out together and holding each other through the seasons when holding each other was the only thing left to do.
We are on to our next adventure. We hope our next home can hold as many memories as our last one. We hope it can take a beating from two Wild Things and still be standing. We hope it has room for a peach tree.
We’ll be fine. We’ve always been fine.
We’ve got each other. That’s the whole thing, really. That’s always been the whole thing.
B.T. Clark is an award-winning journalist and the Publisher of The Georgia Sun. He has 25 years of experience in journalism and served as Managing Editor of Neighbor Newspapers in metro Atlanta for 15 years and Digital Director at Times-Journal Inc. for 8 years. His work has appeared in several newspapers throughout the state including Neighbor Newspapers, The Cherokee Tribune and The Marietta Daily Journal. He is a Georgia native and a fifth-generation Georgian.
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
