Well, it hasn't been a full month yet since I've been here at the blog. I'm on a roll!
We've been a tad busy since we returned from our summer up north, tending to our Oyster Haven rental house and visiting with my mom and other relatives who still live in the NY town where my husband and I grew up and met in high school. We've been to some grandkids' soccer games since we got back, helped one of our sons with his basement finishing project, done a bit of babysitting...in a nutshell, we are right back in the swing things. Such is our life here in VA, and it is a good one.
We stay most of the summer in my husband's childhood home just down the road from Oyster Haven, which he and his seven siblings put into an LLC in 2009 when their mom died (their dad had passed away in 2003). They all wanted to hang onto it, because not only is it a big, lovely house, but Lake Champlain is right out in the back yard. The location is almost too good to be true. And it's such a great meeting place for the far-flung eight siblings. Well, they used to be far-flung...two of my husband's sisters have houses almost next-door to where they grew up, where they live full-time now; and two other sisters have bought houses in the neighborhood as well, which are mostly vacation homes at present. But I digress.
Anyway, the idea of keeping a beloved home in the family touches me deeply. Not one of my husband's siblings can fathom a world wherein someone else owns that house. (I'm a bit attached to it, too, as I can still remember all the time I spent there as a kid, throughout high school, when I was dating my husband.) It was so worth it to them to keep it in the family that they bought an investment property out in South Bend some years back, to rent out for Notre Dame football weekends, in order to have the extra income needed for the upkeep and taxes at the family homestead in NY. (They recently sold that South Bend property and put all the proceeds into the LLC, and just let me put it this way: that house, which was within walking distance to the football field, was an exceptionally wise investment!)
It's easy to fall in love with a house when it contains so many happy memories and reminds us of the ones we love most every time we walk in the door. We had such a house in NH, a Colonial beauty where we lived for 26 years and raised our five sons. Our oldest was only half-way through first grade when we bought it, and our youngest had yet to be born. It was a "forever home" type of house--not on a lake, but on a quiet cul-de-sac street in a sweet New England town, with deer-filled woods behind it and vast green yards in both front and back. I loved that house. We all loved that house.
Okay, looking for the above photo of our NH house (I got out my flash drives to hunt it down!) led me to this oldie-but-goodie, one of the pre-digital age grainy snapshots with which most of my photo albums are filled. These faces!! [sob] If only you could more clearly see how ridiculously cute these boys are.
That picture was taken in the family room just a few years after we moved into that house, on the occasion of son #2's First Holy Communion. Excuse me...now I need a tissue. Be right back.
Okay, moving on!
Once our boys all graduated from college and went off into their grown-up lives, we still thought we might hang onto the NH house, that it would be our home base when we weren't traveling to see kids living in different states. After he got his masters, our second-oldest was living about an hour away, working as a high school math teacher, and he had no plans to relocate; we figured as long as we had even one son close by, we would stay put. But then he met his future wife at his brother's wedding in 2013 (he was a groomsman; she was a former college classmate and bridesmaid), and before long, he was moving to VA, where his wife grew up. And where he had two brothers who had also settled in VA, about an hour-and-a-half away from his new home.
So--by 2014, we had three out of five sons living near each other in VA, our oldest married and living out in the Midwest, and our youngest still in college (but planning to go Army active duty and be stationed who-knows-where after graduation), and we had no one (not even any extended family) living in NH. We were almost always on a plane or on a road trip to visit our boys, and we were hardly ever there. It didn't seem like the place for us anymore. Where would we end up?
By happenstance, we stumbled upon our Oyster Haven house when we were up visiting family in NY during the summer of 2015 and saw the "For Sale" sign as we drove by it. We decided we would buy it and rent it out until my husband retired, and then we'd sell our NH house and that would become our new home base.
But God had other plans for us...
Here we are in 2017, after we'd purchased our house in VA--taking a tour of it with two of our boys and their wives, who live about 35-40 minutes away from us and only minutes from each other. We originally thought we might have to rent this house out until we could sell our beloved NH house; but that same day, we found out that our NH house had sold--without ever having to be listed--for the price we were asking. (Everything was falling into place in the most perfect way! There's a bit of a long story involved, and I don't want to tell it again; but if you're interested, you can read about it here.)
