To move or not to move? That is the question.
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Well, it has been the question in our house at times, though not often with much real momentum. Nearly 14 years into our “starter home,” it looks increasingly likely with each neighborhood get-together that our starter home will be our finisher home as well.
That was not the intent when the childless, still relatively newlyweds moved into their three-bedroom ranch, a space that seemed so vast in comparison to their apartment at the time that the wife wondered aloud how they would ever fill the cavernous place up. Wonder no more.
Granted, we could be a little more deliberate about the items we keep and what we toss, the three children we’ve since accumulated notwithstanding. They’re pretty much keepers regardless, though there are days that seems negotiable. It’s a tipping point many families face – do we move to a bigger home, and leave a locale to which we’ve grown both accustomed and happy? Or do we add on to the existing house to make it better work for the growing volume of people and stuff?
Those questions so dominated our thinking around the first of the year that answering them proved worthy of a spot on my list of New Year’s resolutions – should we stay or should we go? Four months into 2016, reconfiguration appears to be at least the short-term answer. It’s not that we want to leave our neighborhood or even our block, so how can we make the house we have better work for us rather than starting all over again someplace else?
Funny how things change over time. For a generation that grew up in their parents’ world of disposable lifestyles – don’t like your home, your job, your car, even your spouse? Just get a new one! – there’s something comforting now about roots and stability.
Maybe it’s the feeling of knowing that you can roll up from work on a nice Friday evening in the spring to find an impromptu happy hour in your driveway. With children chasing one another from yard to yard, pizza orders being placed for delivery and adult beverages in hand, it’s not always peace and quiet we sometimes crave after a long day at the office but the shared experience that everyone is ready to let loose a little at the end of a long week.
Or maybe it’s returning home from a trip out of the country in celebration of your wife’s milestone birthday, only to find the house decorated inside and out in commemoration of that milestone, the work of neighborhood women friends who made sure she knew that birthday had not gone unnoticed.
Or maybe it’s the weekend cookout in the neighbors’ adjacent yard, the one that followed a backyard gathering in our yard the night before, together the perfect way to cap a couple of unseasonably warm April weekend days that felt more like summer than spring.
Maybe it’s just community.
One night this week, our youngest son asked me out of the blue on the way home from baseball practice what I’d liked most about being a kid (his clear assumption being that the old man can still remember things from that long ago). The thought that immediately came to mind was Tuesday nights in the summer. For some reason, those are my most enduring memories of my youth – fresh cut grass, riding bikes, running around and getting dirty before coming in to get cleaned up and watching “Happy Days.” What can I say, the mind works the way that it works.
To summarize all of that, instead I told him my favorite part of being a kid had been just playing with friends and living life without a care in the world, years from the worries of adulthood like tax returns, job relocations, home additions and ideas of moving – though I didn’t spell those out for him, of course. Simply put, your home was where it was and life was where it was because that’s what it had always been. That’s all you’d known, so why would it be any different?
I don’t know about you, but if I could consistently recapture that feeling, that feeling that all is right in the world and you don’t have a care in it, I would bottle it and sell it right alongside those adult beverages. No, it’s not that simple, and it never really was. Youth is a cocoon of innocence wrapped in a protective layer of obliviousness, as well it should be for as long as it possibly can.
That same night that our son asked what I’d liked best about being a kid, the neighbor woman whose house we’d enjoyed backyard dinner at the night before shared with my wife that her husband – he too having entertained the thought of more spacious digs – had resolved in his mind that they were just fine where they’re at. That he preferred they instead make their current home work for them rather than moving.
Then it hit me – he’d found his bottle of Tuesday nights, of fresh cut grass and “Happy Days.”
If even just for an instant.
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives, works and parents in Naperville.
Twitter: @RobManker
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