Box full of memories

This house has been a part of my entire life. It's my grandparent's house, my Pop-Pop and Mom-Mom's house, although they haven't lived there for 13 or so years. My Aunt and Uncle live there now, or, actually, my Aunt will live there until around the end of this month. They are moving to Florida and selling this house.

Although I haven't visited them much here (we see them at my cousins or at our house or out at dinner), this house has always been there, waiting for me, as if it would always be there, would always house the memories of all the Christmas's, birthday parties, Fourth of July/Pop-Pop's Birthday picnics, Thanksgivings, MANY Eagles games where I learned how to yell and scream with the best of them!...all the hide-in-seek games my sister and my cousins and I played. It will be someone else's house soon. And that makes me sad, to think that someone else's family will now create their own memories in this house. But it sorta makes me happy, too.

What's most sad, I think, is that I will never be welcome back to this house with all the love of family. It will become another house you pass by and wonder what it looks like inside, do the people who live there love each other, does the powder room still smell like Mom-Mom?

It's not a big house, it's not a fancy house. It's plain on the outside, and pretty plain on the inside. It's not got a ton of land, it's only feet away from "the pike." In all honesty, it's just a house.

All the memories that this house holds, both good and bad, don't get sold to the next family that will live there. Those memories get to stay with us, in all of us who ever stepped foot in that house; who ever watched Mom-Mom play solitaire at the dining room table; brought Pop-Pop his scotch on the rocks in the living room where he'd be sitting in his chair and (before 1975ish) watch him smoke his cigarette and dump the ashes in that HUGE ashtray that used to sit by his chair; listened to KYW 1060 on the little radio in the kitchen (and can still hear that station jingle, over and over and over again!); learned how to knit with Mom-Mom in the living room with that big, big mirror behind the couch; watched an Eagles game with the Cunningham family; picked strawberries with Mom-Mom out of her garden; hid underneath the great big evergreen tree on the corner of the property; and so on, and so forth.

I'll miss this house. It was a good house. I hope the next family that lives there cherishes the memories it will help create as much as our family does.