We are readying our house for sale.

This house energetically reached out and grabbed me from the moment I first entered her front door.

Home for the last nine years is a grand old foursquare Victorian. She has gleaming wood and stained and leaded glass windows and she has held us with such grace. Parties – those I know about and the many I do not – to celebrate graduations and weddings and college leave-takings and returns and room to settle when life threw curves and coffee pots drained and cards dealt and meals shared and flotsam and jetsam accumulated through nine years of merging and setting out; all these things live in this place.

We are readying her for her next work.

And we are having to do our own work of celebrating and marking and mourning that which was and that which will be no more as well as that which will always be.

It seems I tell my life through dogs and houses.

I mark my days and ways of being according to the dog love and the house that conspired to hold me.

This house has held me and mine with such grace.

It is the house of Zoe, Mick and Ball and an Olm Wiggen Macaulay clan made flesh under her roof.

Good work.