Another House-iversary

This quirky, wonderful, old house has been around for 121 years. Today, we’re celebrating that this house and this street have been ours to love for exactly six of those.

It’s been a beautiful year in this house. We brought our fourth child, our precious girl, home to it. We painted the walls. We changed the boys’ room from a nursery to a “big boy room,” complete with the coolest triple bunk bed. We found tables and chairs and lights and a fire pit to make our backyard beautiful and welcoming. We have experienced the love and goodness of God through each other.

It’s been a beautiful year on our street too. Our neighbor stopped me—just in the nick of time—from pulling up what I thought was a weed but was actually a moon flower that somehow took root in our mostly bare landscaping out front, and now it’s thriving with broad, rich green leaves. He says blooms should come next year. 

One evening a few weeks ago, I heard a hiss from our neighborhood raccoon (I am open to name suggestions for our nocturnal friend) followed immediately by a shriek from my neighbor. We ran to the door to help, and saw that there was already another neighbor sprinting toward her, waving her arms to scare the raccoon away. 

At Christmas, our across-the-street neighbor brought us a can of peach preserves, a generous gift in a year with the smallest peach crop in decades.

We brought in a driveway-sized dumpster for spring cleaning this year, and told our neighbors to toss in whatever they wanted to get rid of. During said spring cleaning, we ran around back to our neighbor’s workshop in search of a shop vac to borrow, and he just gave it to us instead. 

It’s been a summer of last minute texts for peach cobbler and ice cream on our back patio and a late-evening chat on their front porch, of front fence chats with some of the quieter neighbors, of sweeping the side walk in front of the houses next to us as well, because why not. 

The other day, we finally met our elderly neighbor in the house on the corner, who has lived in her house for decades, while she was out on a later-than-usual walk with her dog. It was clear that she has observed a good bit of life at the Mellema house from her front window, and she told us that she loves having little ones on the street again. 

She said that it made her laugh a few weeks ago when Noah was pulling Henry in the wagon and took off running down the street, Henry in tow, as I chased after them with Jane in my arms (I don’t remember it being quite so humorous, but her retelling did make me laugh). 

She said she was touched by how, when I caught up to them, I first hugged them both, and then got down on their level to talk to them before we walked back together. She said she can tell how much love we have for each other and how much we enjoy being a family.

The homes on our block are over a century old, and I love listening to our neighbors as we all swap stories and tidbits we’ve learned about the history of our houses and our neighborhood. It’s a beautiful thing to feel a part of something bigger than yourself.

Yet the love and life of Christ in our home bears witness to the truth that our family, our home, our street is caught up in something not just a century old, but something eternal. We want to notice what the Spirit is already doing on our street and join him in that work. We want to be a faithful kingdom presence.

Wendell Berry writes of this in one of my favorite novels, Hannah Coulter:

“Watching him and watching myself in my memory now…I know what we were trying to stand for, and what I believe we did stand for: the possibility that among the world’s wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for each other would be a way of loving their place. This love would be one of the acts of the greater love that holds and cherishes all the world.”

Oh Jesus, as we grow roots down into your Greater Love, make it in our place—our home, our neighborhood—as it is in heaven.