The winds of change are blowing for me in many areas now. I am packing up house and moving to a new home after seven amazing, inspiring and healing years in the one location. Suddenly my head and days are filled with a long list of things that need to be organised, cleared, paid, re-scheduled, moved and thrown out, while at the same time I attempt to keep up with everything else in my life.
As lists are formed and I contemplate how many change of address notifications I need to make on top of everything else, it is easy to feel a bit overwhelmed by what lies ahead. At the same time, I am excited about the fresh start that awaits and the new opportunity to put my mark on another house and make it my home.
I am not a serial home mover but I have made some big leaps over the years with a change in personal circumstances usually the driving force behind each move. Truth is people move every day in life and for me, on this occasion, I am happy to say the move ahead is really nothing to be getting my knickers in a knot about. It is clearly time for expansion to accommodate both more personal growth and my growing teenagers! However, the home I am leaving will always have a special place in my heart. It was the first home I moved to after I ended my marriage and I can still recall images and feelings from my very first visit as the agent showed me through.
Sunlight streamed through the vintage glass panel front door and warm golden light filled the empty living area. As I walked upon the caramel coloured floorboards, I followed the agent to a quaint kitchen and larder room, through bedrooms and bathrooms and ended up on the upstairs balcony where I could see and hear the ocean roar and smell the sea. I was sold. I was completely and utterly terrified beyond words, but I was sold.
This was an entirely new experience to me, I was alone and making all the decisions, I didn’t have any money, I had very little furniture or furnishing and didn’t know if I would last seven months, never mind the seven years that eventuated, but the energy of the house had spoken to me and it offered me safety and hope. My two children were younger then of course and they shared a bedroom for a few years next to mine. Strange noises to which we were all unacquainted with filled our nights. Trees rubbed on the side of the house, shade-cloths flapped in the breeze and birds hopping on the tin roof sounded like leprechauns tap dancing with steel boots on. It was all very new, everything from the noises we heard to the circumstances, but we coped, I coped, and we bloomed in ways never conceivable to me at the time. It was a house that healed me and in turn healed us all. It was a safe and happy home that allowed me to grow. It allowed me to unleash my resourcefulness and creativeness. It was a crazy happy home filled with laughter where I raised my children with endless love and nurtured them into being the amazing souls they are today. It was a house that became a home and filled our hearts with the same warm golden light that shone through the vintage glass door on my very first visit. That light will never fade from my memory or my heart.
Now it is time to hand it over for someone else who needs a loving nurturing space and it is time for me to move on. I leave this house an entirely different person to the one that walked through the front door seven years ago. Gone is the terrified, timid, afraid to speak, unable to make a decision, self-doubting child who was filled with an overwhelming lack of self-belief and an inability to live freely. In its place is a wise woman, confident, capable, self-respecting with clear boundaries and filled with love for self and others. This is the woman who will now enter the door of a new home and begin a whole new chapter of life. This is me and I have been blessed with the good fortune that has brought me this far, and will lead me forward to a new tomorrow, to my new home sweet home.