One of my favorite books is The Giving Tree. It's about a tree that gives and gives at every life stage of a boy's life until there's nothing left of the tree but a stump for an old man to sit on.
A house is like a tree. You take a lot from it. You learn a lot from it. It outlasts you.
The first home that your Mom and I owned was at 1002 North Oakes in Tacoma. So help me God, I hope whenever you read this letter, that house isn't torn down and turned into a multi-unit. Iād rather it be a stump.
The house was built by Canadian Henry Choinere, who purchased the land in 1903 and completed the house in 1904. The house exchanged many hands a hundred years before we found it, right after the Great Recession and huge collapse of the real estate market between 2008 and 2012. It felt risky to buy it at the time in 2009 for $235,000.
Your Mom and I sort of grew up in the house. We grew from carefree 20-somethings into semi-responsible adults. We lived through life stages.
We got engaged and came back to that house. We got married in Indiana, flew to Costa Rica to honeymoon and came back to that house. We learned about failed pregnancies and returned to that house. We adopted our first dog Gianna and lost her in that house. We were chicken farmers right outside that house. We threw parties in that house, great Halloween parties with an orange room for photos. We lived with your uncle Sergio for four years in that house and watched him grow up, too.
We brought you home from the hospital to that house.
We lived through amazing moments for the first time as parents with you in that house. Restless nights. Poopy diapers. More poopy diapers. Watching you laugh for the first time in the living room. Watching you roll over. Watching you crawl. Watching you stumble. Watching you walk and run. We brought your brother home to that house.
And then we realized we're all getting too big, too fast, and faster than the house could keep up ā despite all the love and upgrades and money we put into that house. You better believe that we left that house way better than we found it.
The house taught us a lot of lessons along the way. How to paint. How to pay contractors. How to fix busted pipes in the winter. How to fix and replace toilets. How to build decks. How to landscape. How to kill grass accidentally. How to take down gigantic hedges. How to pick contractors for an expensive bathroom addition. How to refinish cabinets. How to pay IKEA to redo those cabinets you painted and refinished.
As it turns out, the house has one more lesson for us: how to let go.
I had a little time in the house a couple nights before we put it on the market. I was packing the last of our personal items out to the garage to ready the house for furniture staging and photos the next day. Looking into that bare, beautiful 1,475 square-foot house, I felt appreciative. Then I felt overwhelmed. I hugged the walls and said thank you. I walked in each and every room and said thank you out loud.
And then, I Iet go.
Love, Dad