Turn the Page

Late last night, I received an email from our realtor that someone had made an offer on our Little House in the Desert.  Just the fact that the house has a name should tell you that it was more than a house to us.   It was a home away from home, even though we didn’t spend more than the equivalent of a month or two there each year.  In this Little House, we got to be there for the birth of our three grandchildren.  My wife, Muri, and I adopted both our children at about ten weeks old, so holding a baby … a grandchild yet … shortly after birth was a new miracle to us.  In the ten years that our daughter’s family lived there, it was Nana and Papa’s house, a place where the grandkids could come for a night or two … or the whole family could come for dinner. Then, the grandkids moved to Utah with their parents and the Little House went on the market. The offer we received last night was the first offer in eight months and it was substantially below our asking price. We went to bed wondering whether we should even counter but I awoke to a second email. Our realtor had done what a good realtor should do … she convinced the buyer to consider a much more reasonable price. Tonight, we are under contract. By the end of June, our Little House will be someone elses.

Sitting in the park this afternoon, letting the realization that a chapter in our lives has come to an end settle over me, I thought about how often life is like turning the pages of a book. As children, we hardly notice the pages. Maybe that’s because our parents turn them for us or because the wonder of it all seems like it will last forever. By the time we reach adolescence we’ve noticed the pages but we’re too excited to see what’s next to notice how fast they are turning. At some point, we begin to be aware that sometimes the turning of a page closes a chapter in the book of our lives. Some chapters we look back on fondly … to others we say, Good riddance. The sale of our house is the end of a chapter. As chapters go it was a good one but, as is true of the chapters in any good novel, it was not all good. It had good pages and bad pages … even several awful ones. But I’m sad to see it over.

In his book, The Endless Light, Rabbi David Aaron offers a metaphor for the relationship between God and man. We exist in the mind of God, he says, much as the characters in a novel exist in the mind of the author. The author has a plot in mind, he may even have determined an ending, but if he lets his characters develop … if he gives them free will … they change the way the story is told, even as it follows the author’s outline. The characters don’t know where they are headed, they just do their best with world the author provides them. The metaphor of being a character in God’s Cosmic Novel appeals to me. It offers me the comfort of a purpose and a plan without having to know what it is. My job is to be true to the part God’s given me and see where it leads. So,Turn the Page.   Let’s see what the next chapter brings.

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Tags: family, feeling older, nostalgia, sadness, spirituality

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