Life Transitions: Growing Up and Moving On

Transitions are difficult. And, unfortunately, I’m quickly learning that life is full of them.

From the first day of kindergarten to graduating high school, from starting a new job to moving to a new place, from selling your home to learning to live without someone you love -- the transitions do not stop coming. And they don’t get any easier. Perhaps they do get a bit easier with age in the sense that you understand their inevitability, but then only by a little bit. And it still (please excuse my language) sucks.

My grandparents are selling the house they’ve lived in for the past 40-something years. It’s a big house and there is a lot of work required to keep it running, so they’re moving to a condo complex where they don’t have to worry about shoveling the walk or trimming the hedges. It’s a beautiful house in a good neighborhood and it will make life a lot less stressful for them. But that doesn’t make it any less sad.

My grandparents have raised a family in that house. It’s where all the memories are. I, as well, credit a lot of who I am today to experiences I had there on the sporadic weekend and holiday visits. It was a paradise for me and my siblings and cousins complete with two acres of land and a rolling green backyard with a pond and brook.

We would spend afternoon after afternoon canoeing up and down that brook, sometimes traveling further if it had recently rained. We would embark on adventures on the small land masses we called islands and find broken pieces of metal that we swore were gun parts and bullets from some long forgotten heist that resulted in a murder. We’d canoe up the creek while pretending we were the deathly silent American Indians who definitely once roamed those parts. When we could paddle no longer, we’d pull the canoe to the side and continue on foot, jumping over logs and climbing up rocks, searching for treasure and solving mysteries. Sometimes I’d go out alone and sit on the water watching turtles sunning, avoiding lilypads, and squinting to see the fairies that I knew were hidden in certain bushes.

It was a magical place with a house that smelled like warm brownies to which we’d return after a long afternoon of hunting robbers and chasing pirates; a house full of big family dinners, hidden bowls of M&Ms, and late night sleepovers with cousins; a house with a lovely screened porch and deck and neighbors that sometimes set off fireworks on the Fourth of July. It was a place where, at night in the summer, the air filled with the most comforting sounds of bullfrogs, peepers and cicadas that never wavered in their steady chorus.

Of course, the reason the rooms of this house and all its related memories are so comforting and full of love is the result of the two wonderful people who live there, and this fact won’t change with location. We’ll just have to make new memories, and hope that the home’s new owners will shower it and its guests with as much love as my grandparents showed to their visitors.