A Real-Life Castle....

This, folks, is where my very favorite Granny lived when she was a little girl. As I was thumbing through photos for my post this evening, this one caught my eye. Oh, how I would love to see the inside of this house...can you believe it? I love going to Van Wert because of the fun houses that are there, and this one is by far NO exception.
Speaking of houses in Van Wert, while we were there, I was able to stay at Steve and Lois's house, which was, for all practical purposes, also MY house...at least in my mind. :) You see, that is the last time I will be in the house that I grew up in, made memories in, thought of as my own. They bought another house, and I was able to see it, and hear their plans for it, and imagine it as theirs. The funny thing is that I was prepared to hate it. I wanted to hate it, because I selfishly didn't want them to move out of the house that I knew to be theirs....didn't want to embrace the change that was coming. But....after rambling through their new house, hearing their plans, and seeing it, I could actually see it as theirs, and put the selfish part of me away, and be glad for them. I can't wait to get to see it with their things in it, to go there to sleep in the comfort of their home, to sit in their living room and chat into the night, to curl up and be surrounded by the love that they have surrounded me with throughout my life, in so many countless ways.

That trip up north also was the first trip that I was there that the house on 223 Bonnewitz Ave. was not frequented by me. And it made me sad. Very sad. The porch where I grew up, counting cars with my Gramps....the living room where I shelled countless peas and snapped a few million-billion beans while listening to Granny's sewing machine, the land that used to be a garden that was taken care of by my Uncle Doc, Uncle Ron, Gramps, and Dad...and me, of course...all those things came back to me, with a thousand other memories all coming to me at the same time, and even though I was sad, they were such happy memories that it was hard to be sad. The other part of me realized how very hard it would have been for Granny to move away from that house, those memories, and the town where she and Gramps had raised their children and grandchildren....and what a good job those children did with getting things that were in that house that made it a home together to bring to Tennessee to make her new house into a home....and they did so quite successfully. I'm sure I'll see a lot of the same when I get to visit Steve and Lois....at some undetermined time in the (what seems like) very far future.

Here on the home front, I think that PiePie and I have merged his and hers into ours quite well, too....and that will be a story for tomorrow's post.....

**Disclaimer** If this whole post is choppy or doesn't make complete sense in any way....blame it on the TV show I'm watching whilst trying to type......