Remembering: Our 9th House-iversary
Today marks nine years since we moved into our quirky little house on what I am still confident is the best block on all of W. Cucharras St. This year, we have welcomed family and friends from as close as next door and as far away as the other side of the world to join us for a simple meal, a front porch chat, an All Saints Day or Twelfth Night feast, a movie night, a walk to the park, or a healthy helping of bourbon peach cobbler topped with ice cream and basil glaze.
We’ve killed one and a half house plants and managed to keep four children alive. We’ve encountered two snakes, but zero mice, so on the whole I’ll call that a win.
We’ve celebrated our dog’s 10th birthday, a six-year-old’s first published book, first days of school, last days of school, pumpkin season, popsicle season, peach season, karate yellow belts, rare drizzly days, winning a game of Candy Land in only three moves, bravery at the doctor, finishing our many family read-aloud books, afternoon tea times, blog-iversaries, date-iversaries, paying off law school loan debt, and the realization of a life-long dream as we marveled at the pages of Matt’s soon-to-be-released book.
We’ve mourned the deaths of four family members in a single summer.
We’ve dreamed about feasting with friends in ways that have long joined the people of God to the story of his redemptive work in the world, converting the garage, providing a place for the grieving to stay and rest awhile, ways God might invite our kids to use the gifts he’s given them to bless others, switching the location of our bathroom and laundry room, beautiful art filling our walls, which books we’ll read together next, places we’d like to explore, and planting sunflowers under the living room window.
We’ve released clutter (how does it pile up despite our best efforts?!), a chipmunk who tried to make its home in our garage back into the wild, baby clothes and toys, and any shred of hope of getting the squirrels that nest in our ash tree to stop eating our pumpkins.
We’ve delivered apple bread, pumpkin bread, honey oat bread, spiced sugar cookies, Ninja-bread cookies weighed down with Christmas sprinkles, sticky hot cross buns (I’m afraid being our neighbor is not a low-calorie existence), comforting meals, ginger lemonade, visitations of stray balls of all kinds, and fistfuls of mint and basil from our modest garden.
We’ve received help repairing our fence after a windstorm, stories shared as the dinner candles burn low, much needed encouragement, the cheering effect of songs sung to God and one another, prayer on the front porch, forgiveness, apricots, apples, caramel popcorn, chocolate advent calendars…
Grace upon grace.
To celebrate a ninth wedding anniversary, couples traditionally give each other gifts of willow, leather, or pottery, or perhaps jewelry featuring the ninth-anniversary gemstone of lapis lazuli, or a bouquet of poppies, the ninth-anniversary flower.
If I were to get our house a gift to celebrate nine years of life inside these walls, I could choose something made of willow, to represent the importance of both strength and flexibility when making a home. But I cannot imagine the field day the squirrels would have with a wicker chair…
Perhaps lapis lazuli, the stone associated with wisdom and protection, could be a fit for the kind of haven we want to offer ourselves and others in this broken world. But we are more preoccupied with figuring out how to feed and clothe four growing bodies and minds than purchasing gemstones as a gift to our house, no matter how cherished it is.
Leather is hardworking and enduring, only getting more beautiful and storied with age, as we believe is true of our 124-year-old house and of the kingdom seeds we are planting while in this home. But our count of milk spills, crumbs, and dirty toes is still a little too high to be investing in leather furniture.
I think instead that gifts of pottery and poppies would be most fitting to celebrate nine years in this dear house:
Pottery as an offering of gratitude for all the ways God has shaped and formed us through the particular ways we have experienced the abundance of his Life in this place, and
Poppy seeds, a symbol of remembrance and imagination, planted in our garden as a prayer, that our home would ever be a place where we remember the presence of God with us moment by moment and the good gifts that we have been given in Christ, and where imaginations are captivated and nourished by the Great Story of God’s sure restoration of all things and dream about how we might welcome his kingdom coming right here among us, in this quirky old house at it is in heaven.