We got an offer

We got an offer.  On our house.  Our home.  I picked up the phone at work today around 5:15 as I was rushing to get something Fed Ex'd to an Immigration office for a client who has an April 11th deadline.  In the midst of typing and printing and proofreading and adding my increasingly illegible signature to multiple documents, I got a phone call.  Our friend and Realtor began talking to me about a potential buyer for our home.  We were splitting hairs and quibbling about the difference in our buying a two hundred dollar used stove versus our purchasing a brand new stainless steel stove for the buyers since our old stove bit the dust a few weeks back.  For about fifteen minutes, this divergence seemed nearly insurmountable. How could we possibly sell the house now that the buyer wanted a new stove?  I was irrational and irritated.  I held my ridiculous flip phone between my shoulder and my ear, neck stretched, and leaned over my desk, standing, to staple documents together and to make sure that I was sending the originals to Immigration.  "There is an extra fee for hooking up a gas stove, and that has to be taken into account on the cost of the new stove."  A quick look at the clock, 5:23, and I flashed on my children sitting on the front steps of their preschool with their little chins in their hands waiting for me to arrive.  "Yes, I can hear you Meghan. Are you there?"  Do I file this in triplicate or not?  "Hold on.  Ruth, do you need me?  Ok, Meghan, I'm back.  I need to talk to Paul about the counter offer, though.  Can I call you back later tonight?" First business morning.  No hazardous materials contained in the envelope.  Bill sender. "Paul?  We got a counter offer and now we need to counter their counter.  Paul? Are you there?"  I found myself in the car talking to Meghan again and to Paul and then I dropped the Fed Ex envelope into the box - six minutes before 6:15, the last pickup of the day - and finally I ended these conversations in the preschool lobby feeling crushed.  If I could have curled up and slept in the corner of that room, I would have done it. Kids in tow, Paul picked up at the bar - yes, the bar - we headed to the grocery store to retrieve dinner.  Home and dinner and baths and books and curling around one another and now.  Tears.  I am moving to another country and my children's feet will run around on new floors. The first room of this house that we dealt with was Greta's room.  I was nine months' pregnant when we moved in, and my mother and my mother-in-law scoured and painted, on their hands and knees, my sweet Greta's room.  It is still green.  The curtains hanging there were made by my mother.  The molding of Greta's closet is marked in feet and inches as Greta and Wyatt have grown.  Wyatt - let's be honest - was made in this house.  He draws pictures in the steam on the windows of our bathroom each morning.  Almost every single night since we removed his crib, we've awoken from sleep when his chubby feet hit the floor and scamper across the rooms, up the stairs, and we come nose-to-nose with him before lifting him by the arm, up and over my body to place him in the middle of us.  I do not know if it's overkill to pack up the Christmas ornaments.  Should I take the wicked witch for Halloween?  Do their bedspreads matter or do they give a damn about that?  What makes home, home?  How much of what we are and what we love is embedded in wood and tile and plaster?  Or is it dirt and magnolia and azalea?  Is it just memories which could have anything, anywhere serve as backdrop?  Or is it the actual air we breathe and the way the train whistles at the same time every night?  The train is not going to whistle at that time in Chile.  Are we going to wake up because of its absence?  I cannot remember the last time I actually cried, but I have been in tears for two hours.  I do not know how to sell this house.  And I do not know how to leave this place where our children learned to talk and crawl and run and love and scream and spit and pull hair and pee in the potty.  They have learned empathy and fury.  Spite and kindness.  Go Fish and "car crash". In the six years I have slept in this house, I have never once slept here alone.  It seems oppressive to me to talk about the mundane aspects of a broken stove and earnest money and putting the sticks that created shelter for us in the context of property.  It's a business transaction.  It's my life.  It is birthday parties and treks and treks and treks through antique shops.  It's a tree house made one summer.  It's raking the leaves and jumping in the piles.  It's stupid tomatoes that just flat refuse to grow.  It's a rat that came in one Christmas and ate popcorn off our garland.  It's sleeping one night with our front door boarded up because Paul couldn't hang the new door.  It's snow days and sprinklers.  Popsicles and blueberry pie.  Mud puddles, raincoats, Ms. Hasty's garden, can-we-go-to-Colin's-house, Robins and Cardinals and Carolina Wrens.  Stockings on the fireplace, bunnies on the dining table.  School art in the hallway and funniest home videos on the TV that has no on/off switch. It's going to another family and we are moving away.  I think our counter offer is going to be that the new folks should probably just chose their own new stove.  We'll keep the old one until we close the door on our little corner of McMillan Street.  I hope that they will find that the old so strongly outweighs the new, here.  I hope their time in this house will be flooded with happy ghosts of laughing toddlers, family hugs, and joy.  It is a precious pile of stone and wood and plaster.  We did not build it up, but we added to it while we had it.  I hope these new folks will keep adding to it.  As we say every single morning as we head out and lock the red door behind us, "Goodbye, house."  Goodbye.