Settling in

Yesterday, I met my husband at the large house in the tiny city and he packed up my little car up to the rafters with more "stuff" to bring back to the new little apartment in the woods at my small college on the hill.

As I stepped into the house that was our home for more than four years, I felt a wave of sadness course through me as I realized that soon I'd be leaving it permanently behind, although it doesn't yet have a new owner who'll cherish and love its contours, like we did.

Not only is the house antique-ly beautiful, with lovely exposed wood framing the windows and glass handles on the doors, but it's also a place full of good memories for us. The garden, which my father dubbed "El jardín mágico," brims with all the perennials we've planted throughout these years. The forsythia, peonies, black-eyed susans, lilies, bleeding hearts, hostas, rose bushes, and a lovely amapola that flowers flamboyantly each year. I'll not only miss her display but I also feel quite guilty about leaving all my birds unattended (we'd counted more than 20 species at that feeder, including Mr. Robin), even the 6 or 7 pesky squirrels that called our deck their home.

The funny thing is that the house didn't have a very good history when we bought it in 2004. By that time, four couples had lived there before us. The original couple, who bought the house when it was built in 1930, lived there until their deaths. One night, many months ago, I awoke to see an old woman sitting on our bed. She had long, gray hair and she just sat there in a white shift, looking at us with a benevolent expression. The next morning, I told my husband about my latest ghost sighting, and he (unbeknown to me) did some research on the house. He found out that the wife of the original owner had died while they lived there. Of course, there's no way of knowing whether that woman was the original owner, but I like to think that she was and that she had come to "check us out," so to speak. She must have approved, since she never came back.

But after that couple, there were three more and all of them ended up divorced. The last couple that we bought the house from had lived there a scarce 6 months after getting married before the wife decided to dump the husband and take up with a lawyer. When they got married she was a law student and he worked in insurance or some such thing, and I guess she decided that he wasn't good enough for her after she decided to study law. One of my cousins in Puerto Rico had a friend who decided, within 3 months of getting married, that she'd made the greatest mistake of her life, but I'd never actually met people who were married for less time than they were engaged.

I got to meet this woman because they both had left an inordinate amount of things in the house by the time we took possession (you wouldn't believe the absolute filth all over that house!), and she (very como si nada) came to pick her things up. She was a decidedly Southern belle, with an impressive collection of ball-dancing shoes in all different colors, which we found in the attic. She was a size 5 and I a size 7.5 so I felt like Cinderella's stepsister when I looked at her shoes.

On the day she came, she only took the valuable antiques she had there (a chest of drawers that I lusted after but that she declined to sell me) and gave away all her crystal, vases and candy dishes included, because to her it was all "junk." One woman's trash is another woman's treasure, and since my husband and I hadn't registered for crystal at our wedding, thinking it rather pretentious and unnecessary, I wasn't about to "throw it out," as she suggested I do before she left, getting into her new boyfriend's red convertible and driving away.

In my younger years, I had enough relationships that soured over time to realize that love simply isn't enough to make for a successful partnership but I'm sometimes surprised when I hear or see how quickly people give up on each other. I always thought that one advantage/disadvantage (whichever way you want to see it) about marriage was that dissolving it is a hassle, but I guess that's not a concern for some people. And, don't get me wrong, sometimes people wait too darned long to divorce although all they do is make each other miserable every day of their lives.

What I do know is that marriage is a daily commitment not only to work to make each other happy but also to tolerate, forgive, and respect each other. At least we're leaving our house with a better story to be told, one that doesn't end in divorce and acrimony, but one that I hope leaves a perfume of contentedness behind.

Still, as those who know me know, I'm not a person to dwell in the past. After a certain point, mulling over what has already happened is one of the most unproductive things people can do. So I thank our house for bringing us so much joy for so long, and look forward toward the next house we'll own, and more immediately, to the new little apartment in the woods, where we are slowly, but decidedly, settling in.