It’s a big day around here. After sixty years, the physical space known as #2024 doesn’t belong to my family anymore. Two and a half years ago, Scott and I made the decision that we wanted to move our family to Portland, Oregon to be closer to my parents and have a slightly easier way of life (living in Philadelphia was always fun, but existing in a high rise in Center City with two growing boys was not always easy).

We spent about eight months planning, packed up about 1/3 of our stuff and in April 2024, put the apartment on the market. And then spent the next 14 months living in a space that was for sale and shown regularly. It was not the greatest experience and it lasted so much longer than I expected.

One of the pieces of feedback that we regularly got was that it was hard for people to imagine living in our unit because it was so filled with kid stuff. The potential buyers were primarily empty nesters and retirees and so they couldn’t imagine themselves in the space when it was so clearly a home to a family with young kids.

So we decided we were going to make the move without a buyer and hope that someone would find it more appealing as a blank slate. So we spent most of May and June packing and purging and made the big move on July 2, 2025. We stayed with my parents for the first couple weeks and quickly found ourselves an apartment in their backyard (quite literally. They live in a small row of townhouses and through their backyard is a cluster of three two-unit buildings. My parents have been friendly with the owners for years and they happened to have a vacancy and were willing to rent to us).

With a place to live squared away, we bought just enough to make the new apartment livable (all our stuff was in storage) and hoped the apartment would sell. We ended up switching real estate agents in the fall because we needed someone to breathe some fresh air into our very stale listing and in mid-November, we finally got a reasonable offer. And today, the people who made that reasonable offer are now the new owners of our old apartment.

I had a lot of feelings about the apartment over the course of 23 years and they weren’t always positive (it was a fucking gift of a lifetime to inherit it when I was 22, but it was also sometimes really limiting), but in the end, I am overwhelmingly grateful. It was incredibly grounding home, even 20 stories up in the air. I love that nearly everyone I have held dear in my adulthood has spent time there. The layers of memory are so thick that I can feel them even now.

We close on a house in Portland’s Parkrose Heights neighborhood next week. It’s the first time in my grown up life that I will have a yard, a basement, and a garage. It will also be the first time in my adulthood that I move into a empty space. It will be a lot and I’m ready and excited for what’s to come.