I still remember that summer day in 2002. I was 40 and pregnant with our first child. We had seen more than 200 houses at that point, when Ivar called me and said, “honey, I think I found our house’.” Indeed, the moment I stepped in, I felt its soul.

In the 15 years since, we’ve grown our family here, on a street lined with green trees and true blue neighbors. When we came home from the hospital with winter baby, the snow had been shoveled; with spring baby, the lawn mowed. When I had two new hips installed last winter, homemade dinners were delivered every night – for weeks. It’s a neighborhood that restores faith in humanity (yes, just 4.6 miles from the White House).

Time seemed to stand still in this house when the babies were first born and slept and slept. Now, time is zooming ahead as they’ve grown to tower over me. So many candles have been lit and extinguished in this house: birthday parties, Thanksgiving feasts, Christmas festivities, and just ordinary family dinners.

Somehow, we lived in the house through a major renovation while spring baby was not yet one, me coming home from work with pumped milk, washing bottles in the upstairs bathtub. I learned to make enough whole dinners in the toaster oven to write a cook book.

In our new bigger kitchen, winter baby became an avid baker. I now berate myself, wondering whether I – and my neurotic demand for a sparkling, cleaned up kitchen – crushed the passions of a budding pastry chef. I’m hoping she forgives me one day and starts to bake again.

Ivar built a climbing wall for the big old oak tree in the backyard, installed a cedar play set (now no more), a trampoline, a ping pong table. He built beautiful shelves throughout the house, eventually with assistance from spring baby.

In this house, we have passed through all seasons of joys and sorrows, all weather patterns of emotions, infantile to adolescent to menopausal. The house has held us well, as if to say, “I am large, I contain multitudes” (borrowed, out of context, from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself).

It’s time for us to say goodbye to this trusted house of ours. We will build a new nest that will hold us – as our babies fly off in the coming years – and contain the multitudes of our mature years, one that our babies-no-more can visit, maybe one day with their own babies.

I hope the next inhabitants will find as much love, joy and comfort as we have, in this beloved house that has been ours.