Dear new homeowner,

(Do you know that homeowner is the only instance of the word meow in the dictionary that doesn’t relate to the cat noise.)

Welcome to 163 Oak Street. Please enjoy this bottle of wine and a $50 gift certificate to Luigi’s down the street. The pizza from there is just okay, but it’s fast and cheap and it will do for the average Thursday evening dinner when your whole family has a project or meeting due the next day and everyone is cranky as hell about it.

I think you should be able to leave gifts for the people who replace you when you move. If houses had souls (and who knows, maybe they do) the gifts would ease the transition between occupants.

It would be like some weird cosmic way to step out of one life and into another. Maybe we don’t have anything in common. We root for different teams and hold different beliefs dear to our respective cores. But maybe I ran out of ketchup with thirty percent of the bottle left and it seems like such a waste to throw it out, and it’s not worth it to bring it all the way to our new place. And like, maybe you order takeout when you get here because you don’t want to unpack plates yet but the restaurant didn’t send any, and you open the fridge and ta-da: just enough ketchup for a picky seven-year-old to cover her entire meal and find just about palatable.

When I say it out loud, it sounds a little unhinged. Or maybe too familiar? On the other hand, you’ll be living in the rooms where our lives have taken place up to this point. Where we slept and cried and ate and breathed. Where we toasted victories and measured our growth from year to year and lost teeth and socks and virginities and games of monopoly.

I’d like to leave the sort of gifts that only someone who has loved a home can. When there’s something you need and it shows up at the exact right time and place and you have no idea where it came from – those are from us.

When you’re building a treehouse for your kid and you need an extra nail you find in an ashtray in the garage you won’t even remember four years from now. Or the quarter you find in the driveway that rounds out the exact change for the latte you buy the morning your brother tells you he’s divorcing his high school sweetheart.

I hope you love this house as much as we have. Our happies memories are laughed deep into the walls. I hope they keep you warm and safe.

Welcome home.

– Sawyer Lovett