Selling your family home after 50 years can be traumatic. It can also be a logistical nightmare and an emotional minefield. As my family prepares for the inevitable, since my parents are now in senior living, we decided to gather there one last time. Partly to say ‘Farewell, old house. Ya done good.’ Partly to make one last connection to the place I know as ‘home’. My entire immediate family carved out time from their busy lives and came ‘home’ over the Memorial Day weekend. We laughed, ate, played cards, took mom & dad bowling, dug through my closest and dressers, ate some more, and reminisced.
Part I of the Home episode will center on my interviews with my five nieces and nephews. They are all in their 20s and 30s now, so they’ve had years of experience coming to visit Grandma and Grandpa in Brainerd. Each has their own perspective and feelings for this house and the experiences attached to being here. I’m glad to share my conversations with these well-spoken, thoughtful young people.
I’m going to type more in order to get my SEO up to snuff. Our family home is a modest dwelling, as I think you’ll hear in the podcast. But what I think is remarkable, is that the structure itself has very little to do with ‘the home’ that is established within. Another observation, also made by my siblings in the Home-Part 2 episode, is this: when you’re a kid, you just know what you know. Especially in a stable environment like our house, we just got used to whatever it was we had. We knew we weren’t rich. But we had no idea that we were, if not poor, lower middle class. We never had all the latest toys, but we always had food and plenty of love. So we WERE rich in what really counted.