Our Beloved Lawrence House

We said good-bye to our dream house in our dream town on Friday, July 21, 2006. We built this house eight years ago thinking we would live in it for the rest of our lives. Our family was young, and we craved stability. Within a few years, we realized that we probably would end up moving a few times before Doug was ready to settle into his last job. Of course, we knew that a house is not what makes a family happy. We knew we could travel anywhere and live in any sort of house, and still find life delightful, and even enjoy the adventure.


Still, it was a little tough to leave. First of all, we have made some of the best friends of our lives in this place. True, some of them have pulled up roots and pulled away already, but there were others to say good-bye to, and it was not easy. We have been greatly blessed by the folks we have known here during the last thirteen years. They have taught us and set stellar examples. We have cried on each others shoulders more than once. We have also watched a lot of reality tv while consuming way too much good foot together! Doug has been serving as the Bishop of the Wakarusa Valley Ward for the last two years, and the day of his release was a melancoly day for him. He loved getting to know all the people of the ward and enjoyed the heightened gift of the Spirit that seemed to come with this calling. But he made the decision to change jobs only after much prayer, so he knew that the time was right to move on.



Also, in an effort to bring my dearest memories of my childhood in to my children's lives, we had added very personal touches when we built the home. For example, look at this china cabinet:

This was in the kitchen of my childhood home in Albuquerque, painted the same pink that had already adorned the walls for years when my parents bought the place in 1963. Growing up, my parents would periodically have my sister and I stand flat-footed against the side, and they'd draw a line to mark our height, then write our name and the date right on the cabinet.

When they remodeled that kitchen after I was married, they tore out that china cabinet, and it held paint cans in the garage for some years before I discovered it there. My dad was very willing to part with it. We brought it back to Kansas (or maybe my folks hauled it up in a rental truck), and I photographed it, traced the lines, and made notes about the entries and the handwriting. Then Doug took it to a place in Kansas City that "dipped" it in a vat of chemicals to removed all the years of paint. I think they said they removed three or four coats of paint, some of it leaden, the first layer being an ancient chalk-based paint. They discovered that it was solid oak underneath--quite remarkable construction for the desert of Albuquerque in the early 1920's! After it had been installed in our new home and painted, I retraced the lines and had my parents reconstruct their entries all over again in their own handwriting. Then, as Jacob, Sophia, and Meredith have grown up, we have recorded their names right alongside those of my sister and me.

That was hard to leave, but we just weren't up to tearing out the whole cabinet and hauling it to our Missouri house--only to sit in the garage again, perhaps holding paint cans like it once did in Albuquerque! There's a happy ending to this, though--when Doug sheepishly acknowledged to our buyers, Pete and Mary Beth, that he knew they would probably want to paint over the markings, they adamantly exclaimed that no, indeed, they would be adding their three-year-old's name to the chart! So now this beloved oak antique as well as its notations will span several homeowners as well as several generations.

When building the house, I had also used antique cabinet pulls, door knobs, escutcheons, and even ceramic bath fixtures that had been removed from my folks' Albuquerque house during various remodelling projects. I swiped the glass cabinet pulls, but left behind all the rest. This set of knobs was collected at a garage sale, but the art nouveau escutcheons were from the Albuquerque house. They all stayed behind:

Here's the rosebush Doug and the kids gave me for Mother's Day when the kids were little--long before Aidan came along:

And here's the bridge Doug built across our little creek. One year, Jacob had a birthday party out there, and the kids dropped lines over that creek to receive fish pond goodies from Doug and Chad Voigt, who were hiding underneath, wearing their fishing boots in the shallow water. In this picture, the bridge is loaded up with the kids and their cousins. It was taken during an expedition suggested by Haley and Megan to visit the bridge one last time.