Our Last July in this House Comes to an End

We got a scare at the end of May. Nothing devastating, but huge in our lives, nonetheless. 

Andrew will be a senior in high school this year, so on May 28th, when our landlords told us we would need to move out soon, I cried. I had been dreading this possibility since the kids started school. It is notoriously difficult to find "affordable" housing where we live, and within our school district's boundaries. 

We have been renting our house for 19 years, which is a whole other post, but here we are, and not where I ever thought we'd be--Gen Xers who have never owned a home.

On July 2nd, our landlords agreed to our request to stay, with accommodations, and that we could live here for another year. I had been holding my breath all of June. I am grateful and relieved. And here we are.

I've been doing a bit of decluttering nearly each day of my summer break from my teaching job. The dates on papers at the bottom of piles are from 2018, the year I went back to work. Makes sense. In all honesty, I haven't filed anything since we moved here. Hubby did some filing about...15 years ago or so. I have boxes in various places throughout the house where I would typically put all the mail and documents I needed to save right before company came for Christmas each year, 2006-2017!

I have given myself such a hard time over the years for not being more organized. In fact, that was pretty much the theme of my first year or more of blogging. I am actually a very organized person, when I have the time and energy. I always tell my kids that they will be amazed at how nice and neat our house is someday. And we now have a timeline to that day because there is nothing like moving to force you to purge stuff and get organized (we moved several times before living in this house).

I hope hope hope our next move is into our own home. After the first of the year, we will start looking in earnest. 

~*~*~

So, that is the backstory to why I am writing a blog post after nearly 1.5 years. Each day since July 2nd, I have looked around and remarked that this is the last July we will be in this house. On my neighborhood walks, I have tried to memorize the morning mist on the hills, the early evening light through the trees, the smell of bay laurel, the trickle of the river.

I told a friend the other day that the past 21+ years since Valerie was born feel like an out-of-body experience. And 19 of them have been here. So much has happened! And so fast! I can't really wrap my head around it. I mean, part of these feelings are mid-life and menopause, but my brain also goes to other places: my Grandma in her 100s, Carl Sagan quotes, the "big questions" that Andrew and I used to discuss at bedtime when he was little--but not for too long because they were kind of scary. Indeed.

I thought I might like to chronicle this last year here. Maybe add a testament to the collective of my own experience with the transition from parenting teens to young adults. My own transition to...well, we'll see, won't we.