6:30 AM

You pull into the driveway of your house, but it's not really your house anymore. The walls are bare, the rooms are empty, and by some act of God (or your determined father) the cluttered garage has absolutely nothing in it.

This is the last walk through.

In three and a half hours your house will not be your house anymore. A new family will sign the papers and start putting their pictures on the walls, their plates and cups in the cabinets, their cars in the garage, and start making memories with their young children, just like your family did 15 years ago.

Moving when you are in college becomes a part of your lifestyle. You are an expert in cramming all of your crap into your car to move from home to the dorms to back home to an apartment, and you've MASTERED the "overnight bag" because of weekend trips and wine nights in your best friend's apartment.

What you haven't mastered is packing up all of your old pictures, packing up old notes from middle school you find under your bed, finding your favorite dog in Dog Heaven's old collar, packing up all your old softball trophies that cost about $.50 but you'll never throw them away and what you really haven't mastered is seeing your bedroom completely empty.

Your bedroom. The room where you went from reading bed time stories to cosmopolitan magazines. The room where you and your friends went from playing with barbies, to prank calling your middle school crushes, to blaring music while getting ready for parties. This is your room and for the last two days you've packed it all up, including the memories that go along with it. The good times and bad, the peaceful times and the knock-down-drag-out fights, the tears and the laughter.

You're not just saying goodbye to house, you're saying goodbye to a chunk of your life.

So you just hope and pray that the next family appreciates all this house has been through and realize just how special it is. This house became home to a couple with two little kids who moved a state away from their childhood homes. This house has been through fifteen years of two kids becoming teenagers, three dogs, a new kitchen, new bathrooms, a pool, a first day of kindergarten, a last day of high school, one kid "leaving the nest", the end of a high school softball career and the start of a collegiate one.

This house quite literally built you.

7:00 AM

You take one last look at your house (and a puffy faced, teary-eyed selfie with your dad) and you can't help but smile at the fact that a brand new family gets to move into it in three hours. A brand new family has the opportunity to make the same memories your family did.

So peace out childhood home and thanks for being a home to my crazy, wonderful family.