DOWN HOME: Not just a house, this was a home

Posted: 9/15/06

DOWN HOME:
Not just a house, this was a home

It’s only a house.

Gray brick with black shingles. A terrific “open” kitchen/den, laid out so a family can spend an entire evening together in the same room. Three bedrooms; two up and one down. A shower in the master bath that takes eons to get hot. Formal living and dining rooms that serve primarily as the shortcut between a small office and the kitchen. A two-car garage that doubles as a leaf magnet in the fall. And a yard that, despite my best intentions, always could use weed-pulling or flower-planting.

It’s only a house.

But for almost 11 years, it was our home.

We sold it last week.

Joanna and I talked about this for several years. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is a great place to live, with terrific restaurants, plenty of things to do and friends all over the place. The only really bad aspects of living here are ungodly hot summers and demonic commutes to work.

So, since we couldn’t do anything about the heat, we decided to improve our quality of life by shortening our commute. And since we didn’t move so far that we needed to change churches, this move seemed smart and easy.

Well, maybe smart. Over the course of a year, this move will save us the equivalent of days, if not weeks, of driving. Over the balance of our careers, that will add up to months, if not years. Plus, we’ll do our part to save the earth by burning less gas.

But this was anything but easy.

Our daughters, Lindsay and Molly, grew up in that house, our home. We woke up to 11 Christmas mornings there. We celebrated dozens of birthdays there. We ate innumerable evening dinners around the oak table in the kitchen. We read an infinite number of books and watched untold hours of TV together in the den.

In our home, we laughed and cried and talked and dreamed. We rejoiced in all the little victories of life and hugged each other through the little defeats, too. We got sick and recuperated. We danced on the kitchen floor and cried over by the fireplace. We marked milestones, like Lindsay and Molly’s graduations, Lindsay’s wedding, first dates, births of the next generation of our extended family, the death of our beloved dog, Betsy.

When I think about that house, I understand why, in the Bible, the Hebrew people placed such an emphasis on place. They understood that a space becomes sacred—not so much in and of itself, but in how the people experienced God there. And in our home, we saw, felt and heard the activity of God’s good and great blessing in our lives, day by day, year by year. If I were an Old Testament patriarch, I would have stacked stones into a monument in the backyard before we vacated the premises.

Now, Lindsay and Molly have grown up and moved away, so Jo and I have moved on. I’ll always think of 1365 Edmonton Drive as home. But I’ll also know home for me is wherever Jo is, and my heart will feel at home wherever our girls may roam.

—Marv Knox