I will miss this house.

It is the only place I have ever lived where I didn't have a landlord. I bought it 26 years ago when I was a single mom with a one-year-old, just moved to Colorado. It was already over a hundred years old then and it showed it. Even the real estate agent strongly advised me against buying it. I should choose, she argued, something "nice" in a "nice" neighborhood with "nice" people around me. Something that would require little upkeep. Something more like what everyone else had. Something easy to sell again. Everyone agreed.

It was like no one else could see how beautiful it is -- how the rippled glass in the windows sometimes makes rainbows inside when the sun hits them, how the floorboards are warm and soft from a hundred years of bare feet walking on them, how the two old oak trees in the front yard have grown so big over time that they have engulfed the fence. There were doves living in the eaves and frosted glass transoms over the doors and the door hinges are carved with a design of thistles that is hidden away until you open the door.

All the rooms except one had floral wallpaper -- black-and-white in the dining room, black-and-pink in the bathroom, blue-and-white in the kitchen, brown-and-darker-brown in the bedroom... I immediately pulled it all off the walls, which was easy to do since it was mostly falling off anyway. I let Aiden color on the walls if he wanted to while I thought about paint. You can do things like that when you don't have a landlord. It was lovely.

Two years later, I had Tris, so there were three of us together here. When Tris was four years old, we got Spotty from Dream Power Animal Rescue. Then the next year we went off to Switzerland and I married Jonathan and brought him back to this house.

Now only Jonathan and I are here, unless you count Spotty's ashes buried out back under the old apple tree.

And this whole time, our lovely old house has been falling apart as fast as we can fix it up. Sometimes faster. So now we will spend the next six months renovating this house to make it ready for someone else to live in after we move to Italy.

I will miss this house.