There’s No Place Like Home
Nine years ago, on Wednesday, April 13 2005, I gave birth to my second child. At that time, we were kind of homeless, although that seems like an extreme way of putting it. When you have family and friends like ours, you are never really homeless, but we were at the mercy of my Parents-in-law for a place to stay. Why? Because eight days prior to this, our home was severely damaged by flying rocks and mud. Let me tell you…there’s no place like home.
We loved our first home. It was small, with a nice big yard, and it was in a perfect location…not too close to town, but not too far out. It was also conveniently located right between our local airport and our local rock quarry. Prime property, this one.
Truthfully, considering our local airport is nothing but a large, warehouse type hangar and a couple of landing strips, the airport thing wasn’t so bad. We heard a few loud aircraft, but little activity at the airport made for general quiet in that area.
The same could be said for the quarry, most of the time.
We lived at this location for six years, and maybe heard and felt six or seven blasts over the course of that time…until the end. The end got bad, because the quarry got busy. Our town was getting a brand-spanking-new Home Depot, but it was being built in an area that is known for flooding, so the ground had to be built up quite a bit. The quarry began hauling 1,200 tons of gravel per day to the building site, which required a lot more blasting.
I’m not legally allowed to go into detail about the hows, whys, and whodunits. But I can tell you how we felt that day, and introduce you to our first home through the eyes of young, hopeful new parents.
First and foremost, no one was injured, and for that we were so thankful.
For young newlyweds, no matter how small, there’s no place like home.
We really, truly loved that place. It was tiny, but it was ours. We had plans to add-on in the coming years, but we never got the chance. Having to move out eight days before the scheduled delivery of our second child was trying, to say the least. Our sweet puppy that we lost, Luc, was buried in our back yard. We harvested apples off of the trees and I made jelly. We planted flowers, made home improvements, and hosted fun parties with our family and friends. We brought our first child home there, and had already completed the nursery for number two. It was home. It was truly devastating, exhausting, and expensive…but we survived.
Fast forward three months… we bought our current house. We’ve been here for nine years, and it’s home now. The house is only eleven years old, and we never dreamed of having a home this nice when we were back at house number 1. We definitely upgraded when we bought this house, and we used to kid around about how it wasn’t really ours, we were just on vacation. It’s that beautiful. Coach has worked tirelessly to make it even more beautiful, inside and out. His gardening skills amaze me…our surroundings are always so gorgeous.
This house has 3 bedrooms, 21/2 baths, and a dreamy kitchen. It sits on 2 acres of Tennessee land, with an open field on one side and a beautiful wooded lot on the other. We have an amazing water feature, which gives me so much peace. Everything in this house functions beautifully with our family, and it truly is my dream home. There’s no place like home.
I have said all of that to announce this:
We are moving.
Nothing bad has happened to our house this time; we are actually choosing to move. There is only one place on Earth that could lure me away from this house, considering all we went through to get it and how much we have loved it, and that place is known as “Big Creek”. We are moving to Madre’s house, my childhood home. My stepfather’s father spent his summers there. My stepfather and his siblings grew up there. My siblings and I grew up there, and now, my children will get to experience growing up there.
There’s no place like home.
To be continued….