I’m a Real Estate agent. I look for flaws. I look for character. I look for value. I pretty much look at everything as I evaluate a home. Something is different here.
“Let’s take down these window treatments and open up these windows,” I say with bright eyes and in my usual hurried cadence. “All I want to see are these giant, gorgeous windows!”
“That’s funny” she replies slowly with a wistful smile. “I don’t even see windows when I look at those.” That’s an odd thing to say, I think to myself. The windows are right there. I slow down.
She begins painting memory, probably 25 years old. Instead of windows, she tells me she sees her two daughters dancing in the evening before bedtime; using the piano bench to hold themselves as they perfect their poses and stare at themselves in the windows that have transformed into their studio mirrors. If you look closely you can see tears in the corners of her eyes. She really didn’t see the windows. She saw her past. She saw her family.
It was in that moment, after months of prepping this home for sale, that I realized what I had done. I had put the final nail in the coffin of their family home. No really, I was literally holding a hammer. I was in the midst of staging and not paying attention to what home really means.
“That’s where Peter fell through the ceiling” she laughs as she recalls one of her husband’s several home improvement projects.
I had asked a lot of them. To pack it all up, to hide it away, to make it look completely different than it did. They had already moved most of their belongings to their new home in Post Falls, Idaho but that doesn’t make this last push any easier.
We’re not privy to what this home used to look like but we can still imagine what memories took place as we scroll through these photos.
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