Last week, I took the pictures off my walls and I cried. The red-eyed ugly cry.

I took the curtains down that my neighbor, Judy, hemmed for me and I cried some more. I sat on the bench behind home plate and watched one of the last neighborhood baseball games in our backyard and I sobbed. I tried to hide it from the kids, but as I went around snapping pictures with my phone I couldn’t keep the tears from rolling down my cheeks.

We are moving in two days, and these are the things that get me.

Moving is such a strange phenomenon. Your home is your home. It’s where you come back to at the end of every day. Until one day you don’t, because all of the sudden it isn’t yours anymore. The door slams behind you, and you hand somebody else the keys to open it.

This house has been home to us for the past three years. It may sound silly to be so attached in such a short amount of time, but I don’t think it’s the home I am missing. It’s the memories that have been made here. And they’re some good ones, folks.

When we bought this house, we had no idea what the neighbors were like. In fact, it never even crossed our minds to be concerned about it. We knew it was a nice neighborhood, and as people are generally good, what did it matter to us who those neighbors were?

Well, they happened to be some of the best people in the world. It’s like God knew, (which of course He did), that we would need these wonderful people in our lives when just ten months later we found out we were adding twins to our three boys.

I feel, in many ways, that God had us here for “such a time as this.” It was short and it was sweet, and it was exactly what we needed in this stage of our lives.

Our yard was just the right size, and always full of kids (mostly ours). Our basically-three-bedroom home worked fairly well for our five little kids. Our children enjoyed hours of entertainment sitting on the fence between our house and our neighbor’s, trading Pokemon cards, throwing a baseball, selling rocks, or playing with stuffed animals.

There have been meals given and meals shared, carpool rides and all-day play dates, swimming and baseball, sewing lessons, babysitting, borrowing toys, and a lot of “popping in.” It’s been so good it almost feels like an act of betrayal to be leaving them so soon.

But all good things come to an end. Nothing stays the same forever, I know. And I guess, if it wasn’t us it would be them. In a year… or two… or maybe three. It’s the way of things.

Tomorrow night will be the last night in our home. I just cried writing that.

The next day, we will scrub the toilets one last time, and put the keys in an envelope. It won’t be in our possession anymore, but it will always be in our memories.

I’m thankful for that.