{home} a love story.

I want to write about home, here-home, in NC, because I want to remember it, and because I've realized that after all this time, I've never formally introduced you to it.

I've always had a thing about home. A house is a nice idea, but I never wanted that. My whole life, really since I was tiny, tiny, small, I have wanted to be married, have a family, and build a home. Steve and I have been married just under 6 years, and have had five different homes. Our shortest home-stay was just a few months long, when we lived with our dear friends-turned-adopted-family, the Nuckols, and our longest, a little over two years, has been here.

The first picture I have of our little house, with the old 2-door Civic in the driveway. :)

This is our first solo-house. We shared a place with Steve's cousin, her hubby, and their then-baby Mason (who is now 4 years old somehow!), and with the Nuckols, and we lived in an apartment when we first got married, and for our first year of med school, with baby-Grace. But when we found out Charlie was going to be joining us, we started searching for a place with more room, and a yard, closer to school, and through a series of incredibly humbling blessings, we found ourselves here.

I loved it when we saw it, and that it had a happy history: our landlord's grandfather had it built in the 1920's, and it saw several generations grow up under it's roof. There is a stain on the floor where someone spilled shoe polish decades ago, and our landlord used to get in trouble for roller-skating on the hardwood floors. It had beautiful french doors and lots of those lovely crystaline doorknobs I'd always admired as a child, thick framing around the windows and the palest of peach walls. We felt like we'd struck gold.

This image, taken in our front yard, made me feel better on a really hard day.

When we moved in I was just a few months pregnant with Charlie (still suffering through all-day morning sickness), and Steve left the week after move-in for a 6 week training camp for the Air Force. Those first few weeks living here semi-alone, just Grace and I, I couldn't stand this little house. I hated the old-house smell, the creaks in the floor, and every strange sound: voices of people walking by, the squeak of every pair of breaks that stopped at the traffic light out front, singing bugs and noisy birds, everything. Though we'd fallen in love when we saw it, loved it more when we walked through it, suddenly I wanted nothing to do with it.

It is a strange thing, living in a new house. You think you'd love it instantly if you were infatuated when you first saw it, but after the rose-glow of first acquaintance wears off, it takes a while for me and a new place to grow accustomed to each other. I didn't love it here because we had no memories, no history, nothing to anchor us together. I started my life here with my husband gone for a difficult month of loneliness and first-trimester nausea that is still one of the darkest times I can remember.

But from there we grew up. We put some effort into our relationship. I've put nails in the walls and the walls have not spat them back out. :) We've painted, furnished, and decorated. But more than that, we've grown into each other.

We've spent countless hours coloring chalk pictures on the front walk in the summertime.

We've had pool parties, birthday parties, and quiet evenings at home, eaten dinner on the front porch and played with neighbors in the yard.

Charlie & baby Faye, who lived across the street, with Faye's brothers Carson & Everett & Gracie-girl in the distance.

It has snowed, and we've sledded down the hill into the backyard, locked ourselves out in the cold, and called the cops to help us break back in.

Snow on our first Christmas ever spent at our own home.

We brought Charlie home from the hospital, and here is where I fed him for hours and hours in the dark, quiet of the night while the house slept, and where Gracie laid beside him on a blanket for hours and hours and days and days until he learned to army-crawl and could follow her around.

We've had rites of passage here. The kids have slammed their fingers in the doors and colored on the walls. Charlie learned to walk. Gracie started co-op preschool. I've become a "gym person" (miracle), written 70,000 words of a novel, and become a much-improved (but still not fabulous) housekeeper, and a better mother. Steve has finished two more years of medical school, survived the intense study of STEP 1, and gotten scores for some of the biggest tests of his life, and grown into a man capable of school, chores, service, study, and being a father-of-two. We said goodbye to our best friends in our living room on a summery night in May. Gracie watched our neighbors' moving truck drive away from the front lawn.

Gracie watching the Otto's moving truck drive away.

Our lives revolve around the spaces and angles between these walls. There is a well-worn time-out corner. There is a morning routine, a place where pajamas live, and defined spots at the kitchen table where we sit when we eat breakfast or dinner together. There is a place in Charlie's room where we all lay on the floor when Daddy comes home from a long day of work.

There are spots that always re-clutter themselves (with mail or hair elastics or socks or cups), no matter how many times we tidy them. There are toy-free rooms that are never completely toy-free. And there is a bedtime routine, which culminates in three of us kneeling and Charlie wandering or sometimes sitting (for a moment) for family prayer on the rug in Gracie's bedroom.

Violets and crocus pop up in the lawn in spring and fall.

There are places too high for me to see, that are usually dusty. The TV reception flickers out when a helicopter goes over on it's way to the hospital, and a security cart which we've nicknamed "Blinky" drives by between 7 and 8 every evening, when we are sometimes watching Jeopardy.

I've finally figured out that I can cook and prep dinner and do the dishes while the kids are eating breakfast or lunch in the kitchen. They like for us to be together, so I plan my days around staying near them. This house is a couple thousand square feet, and it makes me laugh because I'd say about 50% of the time we are all within 20 square feet, and about 25% of the time we are within 10, and maybe 15% we could basically live on an area rug.

Gracie & Steve planting impatiens in the flower boxes built by our landlord's grandfather in the 1920's/30's.

I know the grin-inducing sound of my childrens' feet on the floor as they come tumbling down the hall, the thrilling squeak of the screen door when Steve arrives home a little early, and I hardly hear the cars that drive by anymore; those are the sounds of home, inherent to my life.

One day the plumbing in the kitchen literally collapsed and water went spilling all over the floor, and some of the paint on the doors and window-frames is peeling, and there are mosquitos in the yard and the basement will always give me that creepy-crawly somebody's-watching-you feeling (even though no one ever, ever is and it is locked up and safe down there), but nobody's perfect. I leave hairpins under the furniture and the kids spill all kinds of sticky foods, and the hardwood floors have never complained.

It will be strange, in less than a year now, to pack everything up and take down photos and curtains and see the floors bare of rugs and toys and the occasional misplaced Cheerio. Because, like many good loves, I didn't notice until it had happened that I am in love with this house, and the sweetness of the life we can have because we live in it.