You can't go home again

In 1998 Dena and I built our first home together - a four bedroom house on a pond in Jacksonville. We lived there for about three years before moving to Tucson in 2001. While it wasn't full of fancy upgrades, it held a LOT of special memories for us - our first house, the house we lived in when we got married, etc. 

We sold it in June of 2001 when we moved to Arizona. And when we would visit family in Jacksonville on vacation, we couldn't bring ourselves to go past it and see if it had changed over the years, until a few years ago when we were in town for Thanksgiving... we finally had the guts to drive past and show our daughter where we had lived. The house was a different color, but otherwise looked about the same from the outside.

Then today I learned that the house is for sale. The people who bought it from us were moving on. Who knows what their story is... a job change,  family stuff, whatever.  But the Zillow listing offered us an opportunity to see "inside" the house that had once held so many of our favorite memories.

And it looks totally different. I'm happy that the people we sold it to were able to make it "their own" and create new memories for their family. But it is a little weird to think that there are basically no traces of our time living there, other than our own photos and memories.

You can't go home again.