The Quiet Turning

This is my last weekend in my house. It was a home when all my possessions and furniture filled the rooms, but now the house is emptying at a fast rate. Most of it has gone through the house sale, other things given away, and the rooms feel stripped back to their shape and silence. Not that dissimilar to where I feel I am at.

There is a lightness in knowing that by the end of this week everything I own will fit into my car. I wonder what I will miss, what I will feel the need to replace, if anything at all.

I am touching up the walls with saved leftover paint and cleaning the carpets so their smells will soon be replaced with the scent of the new owners. Their life will slowly fill these rooms where mine has been for the last ten years.

I am aware that I do not want to leave any remnant of myself here, but is that possible when the house has held me, given me shelter, and absorbed so much of my life over the years. I find myself wondering what that is about. Whether it is part of leaving properly, or whether I simply want this house to fully belong to someone else once I close the door behind me.

I suppose I have been thinking about what a home really is. A place can hold your life for years and still not be somewhere you need to stay. Maybe a home is not bricks or views or even memories, but simply somewhere that holds us while we grow older and, if we are fortunate, prepares us for the emptier chapters that lie ahead.

I have lived in my little house on a hill for ten years. I bought it as a project, something to keep me focused on something other than work. A hobby. A challenge. Whatever it was, it served its role well. But I am not going to miss it, nor the beautiful views I have enjoyed. It is just another chapter done.

This house carried me through many versions of myself.

And lately I have noticed shadows on the stairs. More a feeling, a flicker from the corner of my eye that makes me pause. I have wondered whether I will leave some energy of me here as others may have done. Something that may not be smelt, but felt.

Perhaps that is what I am wrestling with. Wanting to leave cleanly, whilst also wanting some quiet acknowledgement that this chapter existed at all. A small earmark on the page to say I was here once too.