Slow Goodbyes: The Living Room

If you missed yesterday, this might be a confusing start to the blog. :) In preparation for our upcoming move, I'm working through the potential onslaught of emotions by paying tribute to our current home here in a little series of posts. Yesterday I reminisced about the memories made in our little kitchen, which is now a bare-bones cooking operation, and today I look at our living room, which is actually one of the still-most-put-together rooms in our house.

I did that on purpose because our living room is just that: where we live. It's hard to live for long in a space so completely upended, so I've tried to leave this room as put-together as I can for now. In truth, the only thing that might clue you in to this season is the stack of flattened boxes leaning up against the fat chair, and the utter lack of any personality in the room, since I've taken down every single thing from the wall except the big clock I bought Ryan our first Christmas together.

The fireplace is void of decoration but we run the lights in it for ambiance, and it couples with Albert, the plant we bought at IKEA on our second anniversary and have managed to keep alive for one year and four months. {WHAT!?!??!}

This room, though, even if it's somewhat haphazard right now, holds a billion memories.

When I was little and my grandparents still lived here, this was the room where they sat to watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune on their big console TV. This was where I slept on the "davenport" as they called it, with dining room chairs lined up along the side so I wouldn't fall out if I rolled over. This is where I would wake up in the morning to the smell of coffee and the sights of them reading their Bibles and the newspaper. This was the room where they put up a Christmas tree every year and we all gathered around to open gifts as a family, some of us on the davenport and some on dining room chairs tucked into corners. This was where Grandma and I sat almost every weekend to watch the true classics on Nick at Nite, after she was a widow and I was done with babysitting for the night and would come to stay with her.

This was the room I painted after I owned the house - and while it was supposed to be a lovely shade of terra cotta, there was just no mistaking that it was straight up PINK and all attempts to make it better essentially failed. So it was also the room  my friend Amber helped me repaint a soft yellow with an accent wall of sage, and that's what it remains to this day. So I guess you could say it was the room where I learned the hard way the ups and downs of paint choice.

In this room, Ryan confessed his feelings for me, told me he loved me {for the first time and a billion times thereafter}, offered me our first kiss, and prayed with me for the first time. And during one heart-to-heart conversation while we were still dating, it's also where he told me he planned to marry me. {Not the official proposal, but the moment in which I started breathing normally again because I knew his intent.} It is possibly going to be all I can do to not cut that little square of carpet out and take it with me! The square where all that happened.

This is where we planned much of our wedding, took our first at-home photo as a married couple, and took about a billion more pictures after that. We have spent probably more hours of our married life in this room than anywhere else.

We have truly lived in this room. We've eaten most of our meals in here, prayed in here, done Bible study in here, hosted Bible study in here, decorated for Christmas in here, hung out on Mo in here, watched TV in here, and talked for hours in here.

This is the room where I recuperated from gallbladder surgery and oral surgery, too, come to think of it.

I've gone to war in this room, falling on my knees and sometimes my face in earnest prayer. 

We've lived a whole lot of life in this room. It's not a huge room, but it's huge in memories. Huge in failures and successes and everything that falls in between.

I'm excited for our new living space at our new house, and I know the same kind of living that we've done here and that generations before us did here will be carried on within new walls of new color {and not terra cotta/pink}. The praying and laughing and crying and living will march on in that place, and I'm eager to see what unfolds in our new home, but I'm always grateful for the life lived in this very room.