Goodbye Turner St

We closed on Tuesday. It was a remarkably anti-climactic process; Natalia and I showed up to the Cambridge Registry of Deeds promptly at 10:30, and by 11:30 we had signed away our home of 7 years, 2 kids, and countless memories. And that was it.

The home we did own until Tuesday still occupies a lot of my mind. At some point I'll try to record all of my feelings about it but I simply can't muster the energy right now; it will require a good evening of writing, editing, regretting, questioning, and rewriting.

For their part, the kids are doing quite well. They helped pack (Andres especially wanted to help build and label boxes for Natalia and me) and when it was time to finally wave goodbye to an empty house, they held it together much better than their parents.

Last week, in the midst of our 11th hour packing marathon, we had the kids say goodbye to the whole house, room by room. It was a sweet moment inspired by Frank Asch's book Goodbye House, in which a young bear thinks he has left something behind in his now-vacant house, but in finding all of his belongings packed, realizes that he has forgotten to say goodbye. As always, Andres and Celia chose interesting memories to highlight as they took a stroll down memory lane. [Apologies for the length of the video; I usually try to keep these under 2 minutes but I wasn't about to rush this!]



Someone asked me recently whether the process of saying goodbye was for the kids or for me. It's for all of us, I think, though we all interpret things differently. I think the video is a nice bookend for our time on Turner St. It gives the kids something to remember their early early lives by--both what they did, and the geography of where they did it. And for me, well, yes it's definitely for me too, one last attempt to capture memories of a world we used to inhabit.