That day I stood on the porch of the house, wearing loose-fitting khaki shorts, a ginormously oversized shirt, ZERO makeup and hair that may or may not have seen a hairbrush that morning. I was freshly out of two visits to the ER for mysterious {yet debilitating} stomach pains that had plagued me for several months. My entire body ached and I was exhausted from consecutive days and nights of zero sleep.
But I was moving into my first house. A house that for decades, had been my grandparents' house. They'd moved in shortly after getting married and for the next fifty-plus years, they lived within the four walls, creating memories, raising children, spoiling grandchildren, adoring retirement, grieving failing health, and eventually just Grandma remained, pushing through each day of widow-hood, sorely missing her best friend.
After Grandma died, my mom and aunt sold the house to a single girl, who promptly grubbed out the bushes in front of the porch, ripped up the royal blue carpet in the bedroom, wallpapered the ceiling, and replaced a ceiling fan with a chandelier.
These were the first things I noticed when I walked through the house before moving back in. It wasn't that I disliked the things she did. It's just...they weren't Grandma and Grandpa.
Over the course of the next four years, I lived there alongside two different roommates and cannot even count on two hands the number of times I told them a hearty NO to various ideas, because I wanted to carefully preserve and protect what Grandma and Grandpa had wrapped up in that house. NO you cannot trim the rose bushes. You might kill them and then we'd have no roses to remind us of Grandma and Grandpa. NO you cannot put the TV on that wall, because Grandma always had it over here. {You get the idea.}
But as I grew and the house became mine, I wanted the house to be just that...mine. Would Grandma have painted the living room red? Absolutely not. But I wanted it red, so red it became. Would Grandma have added a cat {or two}? No way. But I wanted pets, so Kaegan and Braeya came to live there.
Sometimes people in the family still referred to it as Grandma and Grandpa's house, and after a while, that bothered me. I wanted it to be seen as what it was: my house. Not because I was possessive of the material property, but because I was putting down roots there and I wanted the chance to claim the memories that I'd made.
When I started working at WBCL, I couldn't put the house on the market fast enough. I wanted to move to Fort Wayne and end my commuter status - and start over with a house that would be recognized as mine from the start. But it never sold. And then I got married, and Ryan pulled up to the front door with his belongings and we began to sort through both our stacks of things and purge...and sort...and combine. Our rule was this: if it doesn't represent our life together, it goes.
Last month, we overhauled the kitchen. We ripped up the carpet Grandma and Grandpa laid in the 80's and put down wood laminate. We pulled hardware off the cabinets and spray-painted it brushed nickel. We hauled the old coil-top stove out to the garage and replaced it with a sleek smooth-top stove. We painted a faux granite finish over the counter tops they installed. And when we stood back and took the final "after" pictures, I said to Ryan, "You know what? Grandma would love this kitchen."
Such freedom washed over me in those words.
That kitchen holds a lifetime of memories...of Easters and Thanksgivings and Christmases and birthday cookouts...and those things are good. But you know what else is good? That now that kitchen is a Shaffer kitchen, making a new lifetime of new memories with a new floor and a fresh coat of paint.
And this past weekend just sealed it. Ryan was working in his bathroom to replace the faucet. He told me he found underneath the sink a pencil-scribbled note with the 1991 install date of the last faucet - initialed by my uncle. {He was a plumber and did all the work for Grandma and Grandpa.} After the new faucet was in, Ryan walked purposefully into the bathroom with a pencil.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Gonna sign under your Uncle Jerry's name."
Yes.
The old and the new. The memories protected but the future welcomed.
THAT'S as it should be.
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