Mourning a House, But Not Just a House

My family, for reasons too complicated and confusing to explain, is selling my grandfather’s house in Connecticut. He and my grandmother bought it in the seventies, a 1747 saw mill that was in desperate need of someone to love it. They converted it into a home together, a true feat of inspiration and ingenuity. They both loved and lived and died there. It was, simply put, a full house.

— Our friend Amy Merrick’s beautiful essay about selling and saying goodbye her grandparents’ house is really heartbreaking — so much so that to even imagine saying that it’s just stuff, it’s just a house, seems somehow sacrilegious. I don’t know the complicated and confusing reasons the house had to be sold, but if I had a zillion dollars, I’d give it to Amy so she could buy it back up. Photo by Amy Merrick.

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