We moved into “425” 18 months ago.  It was only a temporary place to be for a year while we built our new home. My thoughts about the house were little other than “that will do” while we make our other plans.  I never thought of it as a home.  But something strange happened along the way.  This little house has become a part of who we are as a family; it is now part of our story. It has been our very happy home.

425 has witnessed many milestone changes in the Warner family.  It is in this house where we sat together before walking up the street to celebrate that afternoon’s wedding of our son David to his beautiful wife Fiona.  It is in this house where Zachary brought home another lovely young woman for us all to meet before he asked her to be his bride.  She left from this house still nearly a stranger and returned to it a week later with her future status as one of us glittering on her left hand.  It is from this house that we sent our youngest son off to college.  We know from previous experience that sons leave home as boys and return as men, so I guess you could say that this house saw the last of our little boy, Caleb.  It is in this house where our baby girl, Grace, officially entered the physical world of young womanhood as her mother officially left the child-bearing years behind.  It is in this house that I made the decision to leave a job I loved to be more focused on home. It is in this house that we witnessed and celebrated Nathan becoming the first homeowner of the Warner siblings.  It is also to this house where Anna and Trent brought our first grand-child, Olivia Grace, for a visit at Mimi and Poppa’s.

We are moving from here in three short weeks.  It’s an epic tale.  But, the short of it is that we are moving into another rental while we complete our building project.  No, it isn’t the new house we had planned to build when we moved here.  It is something entirely different that we would never have imagined 18 months ago.  Our hope is that we will be moving into our new/old house this summer sometime.  We’ll see.  Today, as Gracie and I finished up her school work for the semester, I suddenly became a bit melancholy thinking that we will never do school next to this big picture window in this house…correction…this home again.  Next semester we will be in a new place, which I will not make the mistake of taking too lightly.  It, too, will be our home for the time that we are under its roof.

There are words from John Lennon that my sweet husband is fond of quoting:  “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.”  I guess it can also be said that “Home” happens in the same way.