Fresh Start

The concept of a fresh start is a good one. It's the implementation that gets tricky. My husband, Ken, and I made a fresh start in May 1978 when we moved to Maine from Maryland. The first six months were hard for me because I was terribly homesick. Then, in October, we bought a house, and the world opened up with possibilities. I got a new job and made friends. And we decided to start a family.

Twenty-eight years later our youngest son started college. The house had been paid off for three years. I was finishing an MSW degree and planning to start a new career. The house was the right size for the two of us again. Things were tight when our grown children came home to visit, but we were used to sharing the bathroom and joked about how we would handle gatherings as significant others and grandchildren joined our family.

Over the years we had considered moving and always dismissed the idea. I liked living in the city where everything was close by, often within walking distance. The children were able to get to and from school and activities easily, and we were surrounded by helpful neighbors. All the major roads ran through our city, so we could literally get anywhere from home. I didn't want to move. I was in no way prepared for what was about to unfold.

Ken and I had played the "what if we moved" game before and never found a house that tempted us to get serious. In January 2007 winter was in full swing, and we were bored with the cold and snow. One week-end we took a long drive toward the coast, through a dozen towns in the mid-coast area. We discovered that realtors posted listings on the internet and spent hours looking at properties. Then we went a step further and made an appointment to look at a house, which turned out to be nothing we were interested in. We started evaluating more seriously the houses that were on the market. I had many conditions that had to be met before I would even consider the possibility of moving.

We looked at three more houses and, as different as they were, they did not fill the bill. We made an appointment to look at one more the first Saturday in February. I was feeling confident that it was not what we wanted and thought we had exhausted most of our options. Ken and I talked about continuing to look only as long as it was fun and agreed we would not go to extreme measures to make a move. We needed to satisfy our curiosity so we could settle back down with the house we had.

As we drove up the driveway, my confidence weakened. The house was surrounded by trees and quiet, yet we were just minutes from the highway. I never thought I wanted a modern house, but we walked into a newly built house that was filled with light and space. The house had more than twice the space of our current home, and it was all living space. My head was spinning.

Ken and I needed to talk, so we stopped for coffee on the way home. We made a pro and con list and talked for hours. The positives far outweighed the negatives. We needed to see it again, so we made a second appointment for the next day. The rest, as they say, is history. We moved in on March 24, 2007.

So we had another fresh start, one that we didn't expect. What I didn't realize was that the new house was just the beginning of many changes to come.