"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves."
- Virginia Woolf
When I look back
on these last two years of my absence from this blog, I am astounded at how
much has happened in such a short window of time! Like a sudden rush of wind, life comes at you
quick, and once you’ve smoothed back your hair and regained your composure,
years have swept by and you’re a wife, a mother, and have a 30-year mortgage.
At least that’s how it worked out for me.
On a blistering
cold February day in 2016, I found our home while driving through the town
of Setauket, an old coastal community on the north shore of Long Island. I said
I “found” it, but I’d already known about the house and saw it on and off the
market for quite some time, never completely sure what its status was. I can’t
tell you what possessed me on that particular day to pull over and write the real
estate agent’s number down, but before I knew it I was scheduling a showing.
“Could you tell
me why it hasn’t sold yet?” I asked the agent over the phone with a hint of
worry in my voice. This was a highly desirable neighborhood, and from what I
could tell, the property was in mint condition.
“The house is
waiting for the right person,” was all he replied.
When we arrived there
that following week, it was another painfully cold afternoon with biting winds
that tore through the surrounding woods. I parked our car in front of the
house, and just as I shut the engine off, the for-sale sign blew over onto the
icy snow before us.
At that moment,
I knew the house had made its choice.
We moved in on
Memorial Day weekend, and it’s safe to say the spirits of the house are friendly,
in case you thought I was hinting otherwise. It didn’t take long for us to make
it our own, hauling in the troves of antiques that once overwhelmed our cramped
apartment, updating the kitchen, and annihilating a jungle of knotweed that had
conquered half of our backyard.
Then, right in
the midst of all the hammers pounding, paint drying, and sprinklers wetting the
newly sown grass, we found out I was having a baby.
Our beautiful
daughter, Catherine Anne, was born on May 15th, 2017, and
subsequently my own life too had begun that day. Returning through
the threshold of our house after being discharged from the hospital, thoughts about period correct paint colors and window treatments that once
echoed from these walls were markedly silent. Instead, the name Catherine Anne reverberated like a church bell on Christmas morning
throughout every room, soared up through the chimney and burst into the sky with
a wondrous toll. Catherine Anne!
Our house, in a
torrent of celebration, had finally become a home.
Since then, there has been about 6,200 diaper changes under our roof, seemingly the same
amount of baby toys littered across what used to be a floor, and more laughs
and kisses than we could ever possibly count. Did I mention I also got married?
So that, my friends, is where I have
been these past couple of years, and from where I will now pick up. The winds have calmed, and I'm ready once again to sit down and write.
