We didn't listen to the radio on the ride home. Perhaps there was too much to say to each other. Perhaps we were trepidatious about getting to that level of raw emotion where music can take you, having finally pulled ourselves back from what felt, for me, like the edge of panic, enormous growing pain I hadn't felt in a long time.

I arrived home to my lover at midnight and kept her awake until 2 a.m., physically and emotionally exhausted, but wheels spinning in my mind, turning over themselves endlessly. Until finally, knowing my mom was nearing her new home, I was able to calm down enough to sleep.

It's been two years since my mom decided to put her house on the market and those years we've alternated between deciding we could just never sell that house where she brought me and then my baby sister home from the hospital and feeling like the sale couldn't come soon enough dying, as we were to catch a break and have my mom actually be able to live her dream of being at the beach full time. But nothing in the world could have prepared any of us for the feeling of closing the doors to that home and to another chapter of our lives together.

We are terrified and thrilled. We are nostalgic and anxious with anticipation. We are children and we are grown. We are stuck in the past and moving on to bigger and better things.

I cannot imagine a reality where that house is not part of our lives. It is a member of our family. A child who's grown up and left home, except we are doing the leaving. This sanctuary that has watched over us through birthdays and arguments, through marriage and birth and divorce has given us the wings to fly away. We are shaking at the prospect of soaring. Janci and I have already traveled away to make homes for ourselves elsewhere, but this remained our home base nonetheless. It is Mom, in particular, who on this day has chosen bravery, as is her custom, and leapt over the cliff without her safety net.

I float in the swimming pool one last time and close my eyes to a flood of memories of my sister and I jumping up and down from the shallow end to the deep end, doing tricks in the shallow end for mom, who watched from the kitchen window--somersaults and handstands and dives into the cool waters of our youth. A yard where we two would make mud pies and unearth worms or dance around to tunes blaring from our yellow Sony stereo. "Call me, when you need a friend." Dad in the back with the BBQ while mom cooks in the kitchen. A dinner party (or hundreds) that mom threw, the three of us scrambling to get the house perfect for the imminent arrival of six or fifty. Chopping down daisies with Janci, vacuuming spiders and hosing down windows.

I walk from room to room grasping the memories and echoes I hear there, afraid in some deep part of me that the memories will be gone when the house is--prompted as I've been to remember things while looking out into the backyard from the kitchen or walking down the hall to my old bedroom. I feel more afraid than I can remember being in a long time and I wonder if I'm physically capable of leaving. I feel like I might fall apart. It's an unfamiliar feeling for me, because normally I have it pretty much together even on bad days.

I am grieving the loss of this house where I spoke my first words and took my first steps and kissed my baby sister's face when mommy and daddy brought her home or the porch where I pointed to passing airplanes, where Janci waited in the living room for me to come home from kindergarten. My Mom's first real home, which she transformed from something pretty good to something absolutely magical with a little bit of design and remodeling, but mostly with her huge capacity for love and commitment to investing in what or whom she loves. This house is mostly a testament to that and, as a result, the perfect physical manifestation of her love.

And alas, it is time. It is, in fact, the perfect time and reluctant as we are to leave it behind, we are ready. After a day of physical and emotional strain and stress we haven't seen the likes of in a long time, we asked everyone to step outside so we could say good-bye. And so we stood there, by the ledge and held each other. And we cried and celebrated and loved on each other before walking through room by room, weaving together a tapestry of our memories--three different perspectives on the life we lived together in that house. The entry way where Zoë or Xana or Kona hit the door a zillion times to warn visitors of their presence on arrival, the ghost Mom hung there on holidays that wiggled and moaned, the front porch where so many times we posed for photographs and where Janci and Mom could be found hanging bats for Halloween and lights for Christmas and a pond, where now, a proud bullfrog has taken up residence and earned the name "Bully," not for his nature, but in homage to his entire species of frogs. On to the half bath where time outs were spent, where Janci went at the puffy toilet seat cover with scissors to see if it would pop. A family room filled with music from Mom's Baby Grand and chatter at parties or holidays and girls in sleeping bags braiding each other's hair, where we could often be found on the bar stools flipping through magazines and chatting up the chef. We passed through room by room reminding each other of this thing or that the room conjured for us and re-telling the most loved stories of the Deetz life story so far. There are books full of memories too long to recount tonight, so we walk out back, not wanting to stay in the house anymore and not quite ready to say good-bye. It is there by the pool, my feet splashing the water one last time, where we three cry together looking in at an empty space to watch the ghosts of our history walking through the rooms. I hold on to the knowledge that these two beautiful women are stronger than most I've known and that our memories are alive in each other. The old house has loved us well and we have loved it and lived in it for a good long time. But the time has come to drive away from it and into a new chapter of our lives together. I try to breathe deeply as we honk and blow kisses at Mom and into the night, perfect in its stillness now that the unforgiving sun has dipped under the back fence and disappeared into sunset.

On the drive home, the talk turns to the future, to the horizon, to the possibilities that lie in wait for us. And mostly, to the love between the three of us that will always be much too big to be kept in any house and that we know will follow us wherever we next shall go.

August 16. 2002