To Sell or Not to Sell, That is the Question

Bob & I have been very preoccupied lately trying to decide whether to sell our home (size down) or to stay put (at least for a while longer).  It is a very complicated, difficult decision, especially for me.  I was amazed at all the emotions and feelings that it has awakened in me.  First of all, I realized that for the first time in our lives we are heading in the opposite direction - going downhill rather than uphill -  breaking down rather than building up.   It made me come face to face with the realization that I am now sitting in a front row seat and I am a lot closer to being called up on stage (if you get my drift).    So instead of feeling happy about a move, I am feeling rather sad.  

 I went through some of these feelings once before.  One day in October 1986 I bawled my eyes out as I swept the floors clean and said my last good-byes in a living room that echoed with silence and emptiness.  I was alone in our vacant home on Oakwood Drive West.  The movers were finished, and Bob had just left too in order to open the doors for them in our lovely new home.  As as I stood there in the stillness and looked around, I could hear the voices of my children and their friends running through the hallway and up and down the stairs, I could see the Social Worker arrive at the front door with our new little redheaded baby girl.   Out the back window I could see Brian playing intently with his bulldozer as he endlessly dug holes and roadways in his homemade sand box.   All the while Brian played, our dog, Bing, ran in circles around his doghouse.  I could see my Mother and Father, Aunts, Uncles, Brothers and Sister and my in-laws as they sat together sharing meals and stories and jokes around our dining room table.  In the quiet, I felt as if I were standing in a beautiful  sanctuary, a place that was blessed with so much grace and love and peace.  I understood in that moment that all that happened within these four walls -even the noise and chaos and the shouting and arguments - were in a very real sense a gift, a blessing to me.   I was still a young woman then and we had only lived for 8 short years in that home and yet I felt all these things.   It is any wonder, I struggle now.