Sometimes I don't know why things happen the way they happen.
We moved out of my childhood home in August due to a reverse mortgage (that turned into a foreclosure) that my grandparents left us when they passed away. Our moving was a few months earlier than we really had to move, but we found the perfect one family home and didn't want to miss the opportunity to live there. My mom lived at that house all her life, so there was 28 years of my life there and 61 years of her life there. Needless to say, some things were left in the house when we moved and we were periodically going back and forth to move more and clean some things out.
Tuesday I went to the house to check the mail and to grab a new bottle of floor cleaner and was met with a mess. A flood.
Water everywhere; the entire second floor was flooded. Boxes that we were packing and items water damaged, gone. A pipe had burst in our extremely cold weather and water was spurting everywhere like an open hydrant.
I walked down to the first floor only to find more of a mess. The ceiling in my old bedroom was on the floor, my old ceiling fan was hanging by two wires. Thank God the electricity was turned off back in August because our outlets near the floor board would have ignited an electrical fire if the water had gotten into a live outlet.
What a mess. It was the most depressing site, seeing your childhood home completely flooded and ruined. I cried, my mom cried, the girls cried. Mostly, my crying was about family memories that were gone forever. Family videos got flooded, family pictures were water damaged, so much was lost.
I made it down to the basement to turn off our main water line but it must have been flooding for a day by that point because there was ankle deep water everywhere in the house. My art studio in the basement, however, was somehow spared. I don't know how, but someone must have been watching over that room and all of my hard work inside of it because it wasn't flooded or touched by the water at all. I can only believe that was a miracle, seeing how every other room was a watery mess.
Today we went back to save what we could and told the bank that we are finally leaving that house and not going back. Everything we left in the house is now their possession and they can do whatever they would like with it. We saved what memories we could and brought them to our new house. They told us that due to the extent of the flooding the house is going to have to be condemned and demolished. Our old house was over 100 years old and it was a wood framed house, which is now compromised because of the water seeping between the floorboards and inside the walls.
It's a sad thought to know that the house I first lived at, grew up in, where my kids were born and where my grandparents died is going to be completely gone in a few months. The place where all of our memories are will be gone forever, but we will still have all of those memories to hold on to.
At least this happened after we already moved and not while we were still living there. That's the only good I can find in this heartache.
