The key turns in the old lock. This will be last time I enter this house while it still belongs to us.

We put it on the market this week, this big old house of scratched woodwork and mismatched memories, sticky fingered walls and thick pre-war plaster.

We are downsizing.

Today I do the final walkthrough.

In the kitchen, I stand at an empty sink that has never looked so clean. How many times I have ruminated there, lost in my thoughts, letting the warm water sluice through my fingers and spiral away down the drain.

And up the stairs to the rooms that have been largely vacant since the kids left.

There is a tiny glow sticker stubbornly clinging to the ceiling in one room. A planet with tiny rings, it stuck there for so many of my daughter’s sleepless teenaged nights.

And in my son’s attic room, stacks of Calvin and Hobbes comic books I can’t part with. They are warped like loaves of scrunched bread – misshapen from the hours spent paging through them while soaking in the bath tub.

This is all that’s left. Scrapple from our lives.

The chickens shriek in the yard, wondering where we have all gone. What to do with the chickens?

We’ve been wanting to downsize for a few years now, but it requires a kind of energy that you have to grab when it comes over you, and this is finally the time.

The new, small house will never stand a chance against this old one. This place that kept the four of us safe though a few tropical storms and cool and comfortable on many long, unbearable summer afternoons.

I thought the fingerprints and the growth chart pencils lines might stay visible forever, but now I see that, in one swift stroke of fresh paint, our children’s histories will be gone.

The cleaners came yesterday for a final cleaning. They took over the job that was mine for 25 years. It is like a load lifted from my mind. We will live in a house 2/3 smaller than this one and I’m so glad to be done with the heavy vaccuuming.

I hope that there will still be a tiny filiment of dusty memory that will mix with the new life that will come here. Something must remain, it just has to.

And I want to think that maybe our ghosts will haunt, that some sort of positive energy will have rubbed off onto the light switches. Or maybe there are echoes of joy and laughter that will be summoned on a dark winter evening.

Or sweet scents of cinnamon bread, fresh baked, that will rise to comfort, when needed.

The sweet will rise, I hope.

Because a happy family lived here.

A family not perfect, but a family that tried. A family some times frustrated, and hardly a family at all, but four people struggling to grow and change. Often wanting to cling to something familiar, to try to stay the same.

But always a family with people that tried to love and tried to be present to one another.

We often failed. And we moved on, waiting for that next visit when the kids would come home, and we’d try to do better.

This home always offered up more possibilities – mulligans, if you will. For love, for connection, but never guaranteed without heartbreak.

Anyway, I hope the ghosts we leave behind will whisper to the new occupants as we move on:

Tread lightly and love – just remember to love.