The Last...

We've been busy this week with the first of the lasts. We had the last day of preschool and now the last of the packing and furniture to be finished. This is officially our last week in this apartment, and to be honest I am so happy about that. Sure, there will be a tear or two as we pull away next Saturday, but I wouldn't have much heart to not feel emotional about stepping away from what our four year old considers home into a wide abyss of blankness.

We'll clean up our stains and paint over any nicks we left so that the next family to live here won't even know we existed. There's something very transient about life that I like to remember from time to time. Being reminded that our stories belong to us and beyond those our children remember that's as far as many of our life stories will travel. It's sad to my ego, to the part of me that wants so badly to be known as somebody great and remembered for all of time, but the rest of me knows it is as it should be. Very few lives travel beyond the circle of their own family and community, and if we all tried as hard as we wanted to make our names known there would be very little actual community or family left.

For now, my husband and I carry the memories for our children. We have their stories locked in our hearts and someday we will share them with the kids. All the 'I will never forgets' and the 'I can't believes' mix with in us to create the piece of earth and space that is us. And so to us, their names have been made known. They are the fiery, ardent, gift of God and the hopeful, generous lioness of God. In these days of lasts, we remember how those names have played out already in their short lives. The spot where the first puzzles were put together and the tenacity that took for such a young mind. Places where arguments were held are the same spots forgiveness was given and laughter rang out. The room where an impatient fetus burst forward to life and roared her first breath. The carpeting that may have not endured 4 lives so valiantly and ferociously lived.

We lived here. And we lived well. We did not live perfectly, but we lived fully and within this space we were created and molded. As we move on the lasts become new firsts and new firsts become more stories to be remembered and told and within it all, within the ever changing movement of life we will remember each other here. I am grateful for this, that a space was provided for us to live this life and that although that space is no longer home it is not the last of us, only a place from which to move forward.