house

home

/ Rachel Fenton / 5 Comments

It feels surreal to write the words: we are home. We passed the final inspection. We got the passing result Thursday evening. Friday evening and all day Saturday we had a church choir workshop, so Sunday afternoon some amazing friends from church came over and helped us move the final pieces of furniture and we spent the first night in our little cottage.

All of us are a little numb and struggling to believe we’ve really moved in. It’s still a bit chaotic, and we have items still lingering in our old studio and my parents house, but slowly, things are falling into place.

We poured a special bottle of champagne to celebrate the evening we got the news. As we raised our glasses, my dad remarked that it felt a little anticlimactic. We all agreed: fifteen months of waiting and working led to this moment, standing in a quiet living room filled with boxes and trash bags.

It’s interesting how endings and beginnings are often intertwined. Our season of waiting hasn’t come to a dramatic finale, but rather a soft decrescendo as we settle into this cottage we get to call home. The ending is coming in stages, leaves falling gently while the buds of new beginnings take their place.

Our prayer corner

There is much still to do, but it feels like a weight has been lifted from our shoulders. As we emptied boxes, I found a note to our future selves on the inside of one of the flaps I had written fifteen months prior whilr packing: welcome home.

As I’ve unpacked, I’ve realized grief and joy are just as intertwined as our beginnings and endings. I’ve rediscovered bits of our lives we hadn’t seen in a while. Some made me laugh, and some made me cry. My favorite Dutch oven. Last Christmas and birthday cards from my uncles. Thank you notes from my former students. A hat I knit for a baby girl I’ll never get to meet. The leftover programs from our wedding. Plates given to me by a childhood friend who has since removed themselves from my life. Poetry books.

So much joy; so much sorrow.

I am learning to sit with both, and be grateful for both.

My little musician

The choir workshop we had this weekend was a great source of joy as well, even though it pushed our moving timeline a little further. My amazing mother took Michael so I could participate. Our guest directors were masterful and honed our small choir into something beautiful. I learned so much, and I’m excited to share about it more in a future post.

By Sunday night we were pretty exhausted, so we ordered in dinner and sat outside by the fire pit, enjoying the hint of autumn chill in the evening breeze. We drank wine and talked about the new beginnings and new routines we were starting, and reminisced about happy memories from the past fifteen months.

Thank you, dear friends, for your prayers and support as we walked through this season. If we have learned anything at all throughout this process, it is the beauty of community.

sinks, stitches, and sanctification

/ Rachel Fenton / 7 Comments

Jake had very long work days/evenings this week and all of us are pretty tired, so progress on getting the house signed off has stalled a little. The last item before occupancy sign off is the driveway, which takes at least three people and an entire day to complete. So we shifted our focus towards the kitchen and finished what we could in the short bursts of time and energy we had.

Dad and Jake worked wonders installing the butcher block countertops and fitting our new sink. Our faucet is arriving in a few days, and I have to apply a few more coats of finishing oil to the countertops, but otherwise it’s fully functional. It’s been incredible to watch this kitchen I’ve had in my dreams for over a year become a reality.

I think I’m more excited about the sink than anything else in the kitchen. Whenever I envisioned my ideal kitchen, it had a huge farmhouse sink for washing dishes and preparing meals. Washing dishes is my favorite chore — I find it satisfying and meditative — and I love having a beautiful space in which to do it.

It’s hard to move boxes or furniture when you have a baby clinging to you 24/7, but I’ve also been able to move a few odds and ends from our current studio into the house. We also got the living room cleaned up, and our rug and chairs moved into their spots. Jake and I lovingly call these our “Up” chairs — inspired by the two chairs Carl and Ellie have in the Pixar movie Up.

We’re hopeful we can move in the first week in October. Slowly but surely, it’s coming together and we’re excited (although Michael wasn’t so certain when I took the above photo). He is sprouting his fifth tooth and loves to climb and explore as long as he’s not too far away from me. His favorite toy is my parents’ screen door (and the awesome sound it makes when he bangs on it). He’s still an abysmal sleeper, but at least he’s adorable.

Grief still sticks us with its thorns here and there. My grandparents found an old photo my uncle had in his place: it’s of him and me when I was six months old. They gave it to me to keep, and I cherish it as a reminder of how much he cared for me.

Knitting continues to keep me grounded. I’m working on a few different projects, and recently had to frog a portion of a sweater. (For those of you who don’t know knitting lingo, frogging is when you tear out stitches/ unravel your work). I wound the yarn back into a ball and began anew, and the sweater still grows on my needles (though I still feel frustrated when I think of the time spent on torn out stitches). Unraveling is painful, but in the end, the finished product is so much better for it.

As I sat with a pile of bedraggled yarn at my feet it felt like an apt metaphor for this entire summer: unforeseen events causing our plans and our timelines to shift, and grief leaving us feeling like a heap of tangled yarn. But we can’t deny there has been growth in the midst of the difficulty. We are all very different people than we were fourteen months ago when it all began. We’re stronger, and sadder, and wiser. I pray that we are holier, too.

Perhaps sanctification is a bit like this: unraveling things we’ve proudly and imperfectly made in ourselves in order for them to be made again, and made better. Doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it in the current moment — I’m definitely not holy enough to delight in the frogging of a sweater or the refining fire of life’s circumstances. Maybe someday I will be. But for now, I pray that our tangled mess will, in the end and by God’s grace, become something beautiful and glorifying to Him.