I don’t remember the house my parents brought me home to in Des Moines. I don’t remember the apartment after that and only start to have some memories from a house in Renton that we moved into when I was around age 5.
Similarly, you probably won’t remember the first home we brought you to in Tacoma where you’ve spent your first three and a half years. Your Mom and I will have fond memories from our 12 years in the house and have photos from nearly every day of it. We’ll have plenty of stories for you about how you evolved from rolling over in that house to jumping across its living room like a wild cat.
We decided a few weeks ago to put the house on the market and find the next home — the one you will mostly likely, pending other unforeseen circumtances, call “the home you grew up in.” Future letters will report back on how all of that unfolds.
Why the move? To keep it simple, we could use more space for you two growing kids. Let’s also face the fact that your Mom loves window shopping houses online, and this is her chance to carpe diem. It took me some time (years) to figure out that she liked to go to open houses for fun without much serious interest. I did not enjoy all of the pressure of thinking about real estate on a random Sunday morning while walking through a stranger’s house, but I guess you can enjoy any sort of sport without intending to play along yourself.
Well, this time we’re in the ring. The housing market is really favorable for a sale. People work a lot to make money with their time, but also you have assets, like a house, that can appreciate in value. This is a good moment for us all to get a little more space and change our surroundings. We will talk about all of these adult details about home ownership and financial investments many years from now for your own self interests.
We will likely move within a 20 minute drive from our current house. We won’t stray far and will keep a slice of ourselves connected to this city where you and Eliza were born and we became a family. We will still come back to a lot of your favorite places, including Point Defiance, the Tacoma waterfront, UPS and Pao’s Donuts. We will visit all of your friends (once the pandemic vaccines really roll out). We’ll also get to explore a lot of new surroundings wherever we find our next house.
Moves like this are sort of a big deal. Most people only change houses up to a few times in their childhood and adult lives. You may tend to move around a lot between college and finding your lot in life. I think your Mom and I are doing a good job packing things up, staying sane and only being slighly reliant on your screen time to get us through some hours of the day.
I think we’re also doing a good job looking forward. There’s a lot to look back and be sentimental about. We will find those moments. But in a house that is 117 years old, we’re one of many families and people who have their own memories. We are leaving the house in amazing condition for the next owners. As is often the case, if you leave something better than you found it, you’ve done it the right way.
Love, Dad