Today is our last day renting our house, the day we turn in the keys for our home on Dunn Rd. We lived there for less than a year, but that year taught us so much. We learned about leaking basements and concrete foundations, weather-stripping and hardwood floors, insulation and landscaping, shoveling snow off a 316 ft. driveway and raking a secret garden full of leaves, the upkeep of a century old home and re-installing a mailbox after a utility truck takes it out, constructing a fire pit, and a whole lot about budgeting and responsibility. We learned about life as a married couple, and made our own first holiday traditions, and worked hard, and relaxed, and laughed, and cried, and struggled, and triumphed in that house. It was our first house. The house we came home to as a newlywed, married couple. We put countless hours of hard physical labor into that house, left it a little better than we found it, and it may have sucked our bank accounts damn near dry, but it was ours. And it holds a lot of beautiful, wonderful, happy memories. I won’t pretend this isn’t hard. I’ve shed many a tear over leaving this place. Most days I still cannot drive past it without tears streaming down my face. But I am happy to have had it for this one year and I know that it will always be our sweet little house, the fruit stand, set way back off the road on quiet, tree-lined, Dunn Rd.
A little piece of it will always be ours. And a little piece of us will always belong to that house, for as long as she stands.
