From one room to the next

"Our lives are like rooms in a house. We stay in one room for a while, and shut the door behind us as we move into the next room."

On a visit to my wife's grandparents' house, her grandmother said these words that only a strong-willed woman with 80 years of memories could string together to express her philosophy on life. She said them in an effort to comfort us when we got emotional at the sight of their half-empty house, where they've lived for 30 years, hosting parties and entertaining grown children and grandchildren. Living by themselves in a two-story house has become too challenging, between her Parkinson's disease and his painful joints, so they have secured a place at a nearby rest home, where they plan to live out their days in greater comfort. While we know their quality of life will surely improve, we all nonetheless feel sad that they have to exit the biggest and brightest room in their metaphorical house and close the door behind them.

This transitional period has ramifications for my wife and me, as well, for they are no longer fit to travel long distances, forcing them to put their beloved beach house up for sale. Next week may very likely be the last time we visit the house. Needless to say, we're very sad to lose the place. I consider this one of the rooms in the metaphorical house Granny was talking about. My wife entered this "room" when she was about 15 years old, and spent countless blissful summer days there, forgetting her troubles and just enjoying herself or getting into teenage shenanigans at night with her girlfriends. I stepped into this room in 2007 when she shared her favorite place with me the first summer we were together, and came for numerous summer weekends and nearly every week's vacation we had. I also got to reconnect with my preppy roots by getting the preppy beach experience I had been denied in my childhood. It's been a wonderful six years for me, and 19 for my wife; we've had getaway weekends there for one-on-one time, spent countless lazy hours doing nothing, eaten countless delicious meals at our favorite restaurants, and hosted raucous, bacchanalian vacations with groups of friends, getting wasted at the bars one night and staying up into the wee hours playing drunken card games the next. On days when conditions weren't ideal for sitting outside, we would pass the afternoons reading, napping, or taking in the charms of the beautiful town while strolling about in our casual preppy attire. All the while, I got to revel in the condo's 1990s time capsule effect, its decor unchanged since the early '90s. Down there, I would get to pretend it was perpetually 1998 or so, and all was right with the world. We had the time of our lives in that room; now it appears the time is nigh to leave that room and quietly shut the door.

It seems we're moving to a different room now anyway, one in which we prefer to get wild on a smaller scale, opting for parties at home with a few like-minded friends. Lately when we've gone out at night at the beach, we've been ready to go back at about midnight instead of 1:30 or 2, and spend more evenings in the condo watching movies than out on the town. So it may be that the condo is gradually outliving its usefulness as a place where we can collapse after drinking all night at the bars without having to drive. The growing crowds and increasingly heavy-handed enforcement of open container laws at our beach have also made sunbathing less enjoyable. So once we have to bid goodbye to the beloved condo, my hope is that we can still get wild, on a smaller, more intimate scale, with groups of friends at our other family-owned beach houses, be it my family's house at Myrtle or her step-siblings' house at Long Beach, where we can sit on uncrowded sands, fix big shrimp dinners, and stay up late playing games and chugging cocktails. Failing that, we can sunbathe at our neighborhood pool or our back patio, and have friends come up to get wild at our townhouse, which we may end up doing this coming Memorial Day weekend. A small part of me actually looks forward to a reprieve from the long drives, the gasoline expenses, the dog boarding bills, and the stresses of packing everything we'll need.

There is hope that the room beyond this one will be just as big and bright, if not more so, for her grandparents have promised to buy a larger house for us with some of the proceeds from the sale of their current home. We hope for a quick sale, so that we can take advantage of depressed housing prices before the market recovers. A bigger house with a couple of guest rooms would be a great place for raucous house parties when we don't want to drive four hours to the beach. Perhaps there is a room in the house beyond this one where we'll have a beach cottage all to ourselves, where we can keep clothes, shoes, sheets, towels, swimsuits, chairs, sunscreen, toiletries, and liquor, leaving us to be able to hop in the car with nothing but groceries before heading down to the beach.