Saying goodbye has its moments

Perhaps the biggest trip one can make is from one’s old house to a brand new one.

Even if it is only a mile away.

Last week my wife and I closed on the home that we had lived in for 45 years.

For some reason, we didn’t seem to be tied emotionally to it as much as we thought.

For all those years, it served as a good place to raise our two sons, was close to our church of 25 years and was within easy driving distance of our jobs.

The day before the closing, I went back for one last time to clean out a few more things and to take one last look. And as I write this, I am more emotionally involved than I thought.

That January day was clear and mild.  And as I stood in what we called the “Big Room,” which was part of the last addition to the house, the memories seemed to take a life of their own as the sun filtered in. 

It was 45 years - almost a half of a century. There was the good, the bad and the ugly and more hurricanes than we wanted to experience.

But we survived and thrived. The two major additions to our house were nice, but the residence, to a degree, suffered.

Why? Because we liked to travel more than we liked to keep up a house.

Ocean Springs was not an area of which we were unfamiliar, being as I am a native of Biloxi, which is just across the bridge, and my wife is from Hattiesburg, 80 or so miles to the north.

We had envisioned living in other places in the US, but that never happened.

As much as we like to visit the mountains and the West Coast, we always returned to Ocean Springs.

Our new residence was designed for what we needed and what we wanted.

It takes into consideration the experiences of those places that we visited and allows us to enjoy what some call the “Golden Years” in a place that has a semblance of the mountains and the feeling off a vacation home.

What more could one ask for?

Next post: Feb. 14, 2017