Goodbye, House

Beth Gramling Sanders
6 min readMar 19, 2021

Yesterday was happy/sad.

Happy/sad because we closed on the sale of the house we lived in for 28 years.

Where we raised our two girls and a few dogs along the way.

The kitchen in which I made approximately 2160 peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for school lunches.

The scene of numerous taco nights with 14 teenagers around a table made for six.

My surprise 50th birthday party thrown by Sara Ann and her friends, with help from her older sister, when they made tacos for me.

A zillion sleepovers with screaming, giggling girls.

The dining room that sometimes became a sewing room, especially the week before Easter, when I stayed up until all hours finishing dresses.

A few weeks ago we cleaned out the last of our belongings from the house. We bought the house in Germantown, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis, in September 1991, several days before our oldest daughter, Elizabeth’s third birthday. I was in the very early first trimester of my pregnancy with our youngest, Sara Ann.

The den — full of boxes and trash right before we moved out

It was a fixer-upper. We painted before we moved in, a teal color that was cool…

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