Humes

Best window in the whole world. 

I remember the exact moment when I realized we'd outgrown our house. A friend dropped off boxes and boxes of unsold yard sale toys and clothes for Millie, who was about 18 months at the time. The house suddenly looked like a storage unit for a toddler (and her magpie mother).

Zach and I considered renovating and expanding the house, even asking his sister to do mock-ups of the space to show a contractor. We love the house, the neighborhood, the location. It's home.

In the end, we decided it was too risky to undertake a huge renovation. We started looking at houses, finding a great home in a good neighborhood: very close to the Greenline, within walking distance to a good school and our favorite ice cream parlor. I'm looking forward to moving into this house, a new space to create memories. But, because I'm me, can't help feeling all the feelings when it comes to the little house on Humes.

My life in the house started before me--with Ronni. I moved in about a year after Zach and I started dating. Ronni and I bickered. We left each other notes inspired by William Carlos Williams poems (Forgive me/for eating your fries/they were so crispy and delicious). That note is still on the refrigerator. We pretended we were French--obviously this meant eating baguettes, drinking wine, and watching Amelie. We woke up early one morning to watch Kate Middleton marry Prince William. One night, I was laying in bed and Ronni knocked on my bedroom door, still wearing her Starbucks apron. "Lola's gone." I laid down, feeling a mixture of relief that my grandmother was no longer suffering, and wonder at where, exactly, she'd gone.

After Ronni moved to Austin, Zach moved into Humes. I painted the living room blue while watching "All My Children," studied for my graduate school finals, accepted a job offer to be a school counselor in the dining room. The night before our wedding, I spent the night alone in the house--maybe one of my favorite memories. On our wedding day, we inexplicably gave all our keys to our siblings, thus locking ourselves out.

Living with a dude. Also, experiments with a gallery wall, which I won't be doing again.

After we came back from London, I blithely look a pregnancy test in the bathroom. I remember leaning on the washing machine when two lines appeared, thinking I might pass out. Humes is where we took home our little baby. On our first night home after her birth, she was sitting in a bouncer (that she hated) while we ate dinner, and I thought, "Look, it's all normal now. It's totally fine." But in reality, it felt like a total stranger moved in and I had to act cool about it. We stumbled through those first weeks and months of parenthood at Humes. Gradually, we became accustomed to and fell deeply in love with our little stranger. Millie took her first steps and said her first words, told me "I love you, Mommy" randomly after I read her a bedtime story. It made those difficult and endless nights worth it.

Spent a lot of time putting the bouncer in various rooms of the house, hoping Little Stranger would prefer a certain location. Nope!

Also spent a lot of time breastfeeding in the computer room to stay awake.

I will miss our neighborhood. The streets which make up my routes have seen everything I wrote about in the previous paragraphs and much more--more joy, elation, frustration, and sadness than I could express. I can tell you where exactly I hit one, two, or three miles, and how many loops it would take to make six. Even before we started looking at houses I'd begun doing long runs through our neighborhood instead of driving to a trail--I wanted to stay close to home.

This street.

Would we have stayed at Humes if it had an extra bedroom or two? Probably. But, it's time for change. I'm happy we have so many pictures of Millie's first years in this house. It's part of her history, the same way Nokomis and Chesapeake Lane are part of mine. It's mythic now. Humes will now be the setting for someone else's story. I hope it's as good for the next person, people, or family who calls it home as it was for me.