my father's house: utterly renovated and ready for its next chapter

It's been an eleven-month process. The beautiful house where I grew up has been sorted through, sifted, packed up, remade, restored, stripped to its all virgin hardwood floors, repainted, polished to a glow. All systems are new. The windows charm. There's so much here. You just have to walk through it.

Five bedrooms. 3,600 square feet. Radnor Township schools. Marie Gordon, realtor. We're ready.

Caveat: That good-looking young man, my nephew, does not come with the house. Well, not unless we get an excellent offer.

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my father's house is now officially for sale (remembered in an excerpt from LOVE)

Readers of this blog (and friends) know that I've been at my father's side much of this summer, readying his beautiful home for sale.

That house is now on the market, thanks to the great work of one of my area's most beloved and effective realtors, Marie Gordon. I'm also lucky to count Marie as a neighbor and as a friend.

If you're interested in a fully refurbished, five-bedroom, perpetually-well-cared-for, full-of-natural-light-and-window-boxes home in the Radnor School District—a house that sits up on a hill on a beautiful wooded lot—(or if you know someone who is), please check out this web site (including the amazing video!) and contact Marie.

In the meantime, I share this excerpt from LOVE: A Philadelphia Affair—reflections on the house where I lived from the age of thirteen until I embarked for school, marriage, and motherhood:

We drove—or, rather, our father did. We hardly spoke, save for the short verbs (Look.), the exclamations (Wow.), the necessary adjectives. It was like going to the movies in reverse—we moved, the scenes stayed still. It was like going window shopping, but there was nothing to buy. It was like getting away with something, but hunting for light is never a crime.

Finally, of course, we’d turn back toward the house where our holidays had begun—the house with the half-eaten turkey still in the pan and the gifts unwrapped and the games subverted. In our slow and usually silent approach along the bend of the last road, we could see, for an instant, our own lives lit as mysteriously and spectacularly as the strangers whose homes we’d just spied on. The shimmer of that big tree through the window. The white wings of the angels in the yard. The illuminating lights beneath the twin wreaths.

Who was lucky enough to live there? We were lucky enough to live there. It caught us, fabulously, by surprise.

From a chapter titled “The Lights Fantastic,” LOVE: A Philadelphia Affair

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what is it that we really need? brief reflections following the reinvention of a family home

I have spent much of my summer at my father's side, working through the reinvention of his home of many years. Today, with the help of realtor extraordinaire, Marie Gordon, the reinvention comes to a close. The house is staged. In a matter of days it will be for sale.

We hold onto many things in this life—our third-grade reports, our fifth-grade medals, our computer-science grades, our uncle's letters, the pots and the pans, the ceramic bunnies and the glass ducks, the extra lamps and tea cups. This summer, working through the many shelves and drawers and boxes and closets and frames, the tools on nails, the orchids in pots, I reflected endlessly on the questions: What is it that we really need? What material objects mark and shape a life?

Today, following several morning hours of heavy lifting and flower arranging (and learning a thing or two about picture wire from Marie), I returned to my own modest house thinking about peace and peaceable space—the families we build inside the hope we create. My father and mother raised three children (and a cat named Colors) in this house of many years. We touched the things. We lived the life. The memories remain.

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