The Demo

Big stuff going on at the family homestead and in the interest of your boredom, here's the 411 :

House tic-tac-toe, with D and family (aka the Constantopoulos Juniors) taking over the house we grew up in, and Mom downsizing to a smaller townhouse literally 2 minutes away.

All good.  All great.  It is the ultimate best situation ever. 

Our house - in Greek, the "patriatico spiti" or "patriachal home" - is an awesome house.  Huge house, huge lot, huge memories, huge patriarch.  Everything that was anything happened at 149 and now it will all continue to happen there with the Juniors.  Sweet.

Today, I walked into the house (can I still really call it "our" house ? it's D's house now, right?) and it didn't look much like "our" house.  It's demo'd - gutted to the core.  Walls are down.  Ceilings are exposed.  The place is a shell and I was simply overcome.

Overcome with what, it's hard to say.  Lots of feelings, but I can't quite place what they were.  I wasn't sad - we all would have been heartbroken to say goodbye to 149 so this move is amazing for everyone; not quite happy - too much destruction for that; excitement ? not that either, the finished product is too far away.  

I think I was flatly overcome with the realization that we are moving on.   Things are changing and while the changes are all good the reason why they're happening isn't.  It sucks, quite frankly and ineloquently.  I liked the way things used to be - I want things back the way they used to be.  Stubborn, huh?  Just like that huge patriarch who is, of course, indirectly responsible for all this change.  We can tip toe around things for a long time - I could tip toe forever, but sooner or later something has to happen to snap you into attention - the walls literally coming down did that to me today.    It's time to move forward and make new memories at 149, only now we have to make these memories without the person who made 149 so amazing to begin with.   Maybe overcome is understating things a bit.