An Ode to a Place, Corinth Avenue in Retrospect
We spent the majority of November this year packing boxes. Our clothes, the kids' toys, the kitchen, those oddities we shoe-horned into the top of the closet and forgot were there—it all went into a box to prepare for us to move into our first house.
Though we stand in awe at God's provision with our new home, I confess that I shed more than a few tears on the last day at our old apartment. The Saturday morning we moved, I sat among the boxes and thought about one of the first Saturdays spent in this place. It was the morning of our wedding day, and all the women in my bridal party, together with aunts and mothers and sisters gathered among the boxes to offer advice and encouragement for the new road ahead. This beautiful beginning, this transitional moment was housed inside those humble walls and seeped into them for safekeeping. It was the first of many memories we made in the apartment on Corinth. This lovely little abode is where we came home from our honeymoon, the place where we celebrated new jobs and made new friends over hundreds of dinners and coffees, cheese, beer, and wine. This is the place where we brought our babies home from the hospital and learned to help them grow in body and spirit. The Corinth Courtyard was our daily community, a place to pass by a friendly face on the way to work, to trip over sidewalk chalk, to host parties with taco trucks and bounce houses, and even once, Belgian waffles. We established our family and lifelong friendships in this place.
No matter how exciting the season to come, it is hard to leave a place. We shape our places to fit the ebb and flow of life. They may have dull white walls or out-of-date cabinets, but somehow they shift and mold over time to mark the moments lived in them. The tile that was too hard to ever clean properly, the fanciful half-and-half design of our kids' room, the bit of laminate transition between dining and hallway that always popped out at inopportune moments. We come to love the oddities or at least love to hate them. Our places mark both good and bad, joy and sorrow. The oven that produced neon enchiladas is the same that gave us caramel popcorn. The carpet that soaked in our tears of tragedy is the same that held up first rolls, first crawls, first steps. We walked these rooms and paced these rooms hundreds of times over. And we danced.
Once the boxes were all gone and the movers on their way to our new place, I surveyed the rooms of this first place we shared together. Just one more time. And somehow the flood of memories housed there drained from the walls like paint washing off in the rain, tucking themselves into my heart to carry with me into our next adventure.