365: A Year at the Farm - Day 1

“All my stuff will be right on the other side of the property line and you’ll have to look at it.” 

This one simple sentence almost changed everything. 

As we pulled into the gravel driveway, we were excited to take a closer look at our future home. We were just a few days away from officially closing on this new house and opening the next chapter of our life. This isn't something we had really sought. It wasn't something we necessarily even needed. But, we felt it was an opportunity that encapsulated everything we had always wanted.  Just thirty seconds earlier, our family was in the upstairs of our new-home-to-be, helping the kids pick out their future rooms. The rooms they were extremely excited to decorate and accessorize. The process was quickly interrupted when we heard a sharp exchange between the previous owner and our realtor downstairs. Despite this being a scheduled walk through, he was not too happy to have people in the house he still owned. The happy demeanor he had exhibited throughout our previous interactions had faded away as the deadline to the closing approached. When he threatened to cut the realtor’s lock, we decided it was best to forgo the rest of our walkthrough and reassess the situation from a distance. A safe distance. We didn’t need our kids exposed to the anger of a man not yet willing to let go. For almost three months, we had waited to begin the next chapter of our life. For almost three months, we had committed ourselves to cleaning and clearing in an attempt to make this transition as smooth and seamless as possible. For three months, we had prepared ourselves to leave a house and neighborhood we had come to truly love  and start a journey into the unknown. But as we heard the venom of his words and felt his fury as he stared and glared in our direction, we wondered if those three months of planning and preparing would be wasted. 

That sentence put everything in jeopardy. We headed back to our home, the home that we had already sold, and wondered if our dream had turned into a nightmare.