Hey Nineteen

And so it began. We spent our first weekend in That Town, in the house that we may or may not be interested in buying. I didn't know what to expect. What if we loved it? What if we hated it? What if this, that, the third? We arrived Friday night, met with the owner, a wonderful character we instantly took a liking to, and hopefully she took a liking to us. After going over the particulars, we were in the house. Odd. We had looked at it a few times over the last few months, checking out the rooms, asking questions. But now it was a little weird. We were in it. With nobody looking. We walked around again, trying to envision it as our home, which proved difficult at first because it wasn't ours yet we had the run of the place. It's sparsely furnished and the furniture is sorta rural grandma chic. We tried imagining what this room would be and whether we'd keep our bedroom downstairs or move it upstairs, how we’d lay out the kitchen. As we walked around, we noticed something was a little ... off. As in not level. It was built in 1843, refurbished last year and there are spots in some rooms that are sort of like a rollercoaster ride. Crossing from the living room into the foyer, the floor felt like it was going up, up, up and just as you cross into the bedroom ... you're sliding down. Not huge changes in altitudes, but you occasionally can't tell if you're leaning or the house is - and we hadn't even been to the pub yet. It's just a little off-kilter here and there. Some door frames don’t appear level and you can see that one end of some room's ceilings are lower than the other. But all part of the rustic charm.

Then we walked to the pub – and there is something wonderfully relaxing about strolling through this little town. There were definitely more cars around as visitors dined in the restaurants. We arrived at the pub and noticed a little thumb-tacked sign on the door announcing “Edwin’s Latin Corner” and we immediately panicked. Had our Irish joint suddenly gone Hispanic? Without our consent?? We glanced through the window, our hearts sinking as we spied tables now set up with food being served (it was just a beer and whiskey place when we last visited a few weeks earlier). What would we do if our favorite watering hole was now a rice n' beans place? We ventured in and to our immediate relief, it was still our pub. An enterprising man – Edwin, I’m guessing – probably approached the bar’s owner about serving up simple Latin themed dishes to the patrons on the weekends, who all seemed into the idea. But the beer and whiskey was still the order of the night, thankfully, though they were perilously low on whiskey. My wife noted it was like a rural Ireland pub – not many on the small town’s street, but all were packed into the pub. For the community, the craic. Not drunken, loud or obnoxious, just a lively place you liked being a part of.

The rest of the weekend was exactly as hoped. Leisurely strolls to the country store for breakfast, a drive into the bigger surrounding towns for groceries and a stop at the bookstore. Then a drive down to visit the family for dinner and we headed back … home, we called it. And it felt right.

I had been concerned that because we hadn’t recently been moving toward being there that we might not be as focused on moving there. But even after just a few days, we didn’t feel out of place, weren’t left wanting and we didn’t feel as though we were missing anything, except as we pulled out of the driveway to begin making our way back to the city. We began to miss being a part of this place. There are still questions to be answered, but I think the big question of whether this is the place for us or not has been answered, and it’s been answered for a while now.

Four days till we’re back.