There is not a lot of time for sentimentality when you’re in the final week of madly preparing to list your empty, but very much “lived-in,” house. I bought about 60 knock-off Magic Erasers from Amazon and started scrubbing: handprints from window frames, dark smears off the banister, mystery splotches in the dining room.
Yet I saved the trim with our four kids’ measurements for last. I took pictures. My husband made a spreadsheet of the dates, names, and heights. Still, I kept lingering by that one beam in our front room. Seven years’ worth of growth in this house, I thought. I couldn’t bring myself to wipe it all away.
And then, one morning I came in and the painter had taken it upon himself to do what I could not. Good man. The pencil marks were gone with one sweep of white paint, and with that finality I moved on to the next task.
I stood on the last chair in the house to peel away scotch tape remains from the dining room walls—memories of birthday banners, or the dozens of Christmas cards I hung to surround our table. Faces of friends from all over the country, charities we gave to, even families we’d befriended through the Internet. I kept them up after Christmas, and starting on Ash Wednesday, we’d take one down a night throughout Lent to include them in the meal blessing. Some would need a little preface as I introduced faces or set the stage for our short intercession.
God bless Father and the rest of the parish staff. God bless these neighbors; their baby died before it was born this year, do you remember? This is an old college friend—she’s a missionary now.
Do potential home buyers notice these remnants of life lived? Was it helping our home’s prospects to scrape away barely visible pieces of tape inches from the ceiling? I’d pick at a corner of tape until it lifted, ready to peel, and I wondered whether memories give way as easily in children’s minds. What of the virtues we tried to instill around this table? What will stick? Of all the things we strived to build in this home, what will last?
I thought we’d stay. Instead, minutes after seeing a listing on Zillow, like the world’s most fickle homeowners we went from “maybe we can redo our basement and make it work” to calling a realtor friend and setting in motion what would become weeks of upheaval and letting go.
I kept returning to the image of letting things pass lightly through my hands: the plum trees that hadn’t yet borne fruit. The work we put into renovating the kitchen. My flowers, the climbing tree, the memories. The chaotic whirlwind of raising young children. From the time we brought our youngest home from the hospital to the time she started first grade, this was home. When we moved the furniture, her toddler-era scrawl marks were on full display, no longer concealed by the well-worn loveseat she’d nest behind. Painting over them felt like shedding the “young family” identity we’d known for nearly 15 years, and it felt a bit unnerving to move on, literally and metaphorically.
I grew up in a military family, with parents who every three years would drum up the excitement of another move, a new adventure. Bloom where we’re planted, my dad would say, and for the most part I think we did. But as a young adult, reading Wendell Berry for the first time made me wonder about the cost of shallow roots—not that the fruit of that life was meaningless; the blooms were real—but by necessity the roots could not sink deep. We could not be perennial, and we were not native to any place. If we couldn’t be uprooted, we’d be destroyed.
Hanging on to every word of Jayber Crow as Berry’s contrarian wanderer-turned-barber resolutely committed himself to his particular people and place, I felt the shaking that comes with any conversion. All this time, has there really been another way to live?
My mom never wanted to paint in any of our houses. And truthfully, I never made good on my promise to paint my boys’ room in our old house, always finding a more pressing project. But in my childhood, it was about literally not leaving our mark. We sought to live—and leave—as lightly as possible.
I thought about this while paying our painter to turn our dingiest walls back to a clean, neutral off-white. We left the navy blue dining room and kitchen, though, glad the color was still trendy and the paint job holding up. I loved the deep richness of that shade—the way it absorbed the afternoon light slanting through the side window, how it contrasted the bright oak floors, how it drew out the blues on the Polish pottery I kept on a set of open shelves. I chose that blue because of its fittingness with other, physical things I loved in this place. It transmitted something intangible that I’d wanted to bring to the heart of our home, the rooms that received us in our need and welcomed frequent guests. Depth. Layers. An invitation to linger—to discover something lovely. I was grateful to leave it on the walls.
Berry convinced me of the value of permanence—not as in the so-called “permanent change of stations” that just meant another three-year military assignment, but more like the stability Benedictines vow within their monastery. Here we will live, and work, and pray, and die. The world and seasons turn, but we stay and let our roots sink deep. We seek and nurture native beauty, because safeguarding it also protects ourselves. We settle, the way the forest floor settles: not in unchanging sleep, as it seems from the surface, but with years-long cycles of invisible growth underground until it bursts forth in a carpet of spring ephemerals. We remain.
And yet, I have realized, we aren’t Jayber Crow. We are a pilgrim people, after all, and sometimes life clearly reflects that spiritual truth. Somehow, Christians must do both: to love deeply, reaching down to tend the soil and change it through the web of roots we lay down fast and the nourishment we give back to the place that received us. But—also—to tread with pilgrim’s feet. To hold good things lightly, loosening our instinct to grasp. To bless a place that sheltered us, and then be able to leave. We press on toward a permanent home.
Upstairs, I found more handprints on the kids’ doors. I worked fast (my cheap Magic Erasers crumbling even faster), erasing the faint remains of hide and seek games; small, tired hands grappling with the doorknob; and sticky treats sneaked illicitly into bedrooms.
The thought that even my youngest children, the ones who still draw close to me out of habit, hold memories from within these rooms that I was never privy to is a little jarring. It’s like when I overhear one of their inside jokes and realize there’s a whole language, a whole economy, that they deal in under our roof while excluding me and my husband.
What imaginative games were birthed into being here? What nightmares did they startle from under their window? How many quiet, frustrated tears were shed behind this door?
Again, like when peeling away the tape downstairs, I felt caught off guard by time—how fleetingly it passes, with such seemingly light impressions left behind.
Near the door in the last room, I found a faint blue smear around my shoulder’s height. I could imagine one of my sons thoughtlessly grabbing at the frame with an inky hand before passing through—a boy’s puckish benediction on his surroundings.
My fingers rested on the smudge with a surge of gratitude, longing and memory. Something happened here in this home, something worth preserving—if not physically on the walls, then deeper down, and touching this one mark felt like a gesture of prayer.
You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, God enjoined upon the Israelites. Here is the way to live. Here is your sign that God goes with you. Root it in your hearts that you remember, whether you are wandering or finally at rest in the land of milk and honey.
I let the eraser do its work.
Let your grace linger in this place.
The paint shone clean.
Shelter us and bring us home.
Image Via: Wannapik
