Editor’s Note: Katrina Kenison is the author of The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother’s Memoir, just published by Springboard Press. The former editor of The Best American Short Stories of the Century, she has written for Real Simple, Redbook and many other magazines. 

"You have to help me through this," my mother said when I picked up the phone this morning. "I know we’re doing the right thing, but all I can think about is how hard it’s going to be to say good-bye." I was 13 when we moved into the 1765 red Cape, with its tiny windows, low ceilings and slanted pine floors. For my parents, a rustic antique house at the end of a long dirt road in the woods was a dream come true. My brother and I were not thrilled — no more riding our bikes downtown for orange popsicles, no more next-door neighbors, no more walking to school with our best friends. But by the time I got a horse for my fourteenth birthday and my brother learned to peel out in a cloud of dust on his new dirt bike, we had pretty much come around. It was so quiet out there, in our small, cozy house surrounded by fields at the edge of a forest. We let the dogs and two horses run free, caught frogs in the quarry, roamed the miles of trails through the woods, cut our own Christmas trees. My dad bought a used Jeep to plow the road with and an ancient John Deere tractor for mowing the field. Instead of a light over the kitchen table, we ate by the glow of an antique oil lamp. When the power went out in the wintertime, as it often did, my mom cooked dinner in a black cast-iron pot that hung in the kitchen fireplace.                                  

Meanwhile, my brother and I grew up, moved away, married and had children of our own. But eventually we both returned to live nearby, and every few months we all find a reason to come home, to gather round the old pine table by the kitchen window. My mother pulls hot rolls and baked potatoes out of the oven, my father carries a platter of steaks in from the grill, and we sit down together, to eat from the same sturdy, brown, glazed dishes from which every single meal of my childhood was served. Being at that table, eating dinner with my family and looking out at the darkening woods beyond the window is not just about coming home. It is as if, for a few hours anyway, the present becomes the past, my childhood blends seamlessly into my adulthood and my own two sons are embraced by the familiar ghosts of all our former selves. Time stops, or rather, it seems to disappear altogether.

And yet, my parents are on the cusp of 75. And the homekeeping that was once a daily pleasure has become, increasingly, a burden. For 37 years, they have painted and planted and mowed and plowed and shoveled and cleaned and repaired and loved this house. They’ve dealt with mice and rot, frozen pipes and leaky roofs. It’s not that, given a say, they would choose the cramped, dated kitchen, the icy drafts of winter, the black flies of spring, the sweltering upstairs rooms in summer. But having long ago fixed what could be fixed, they simply learned to accept rest. They still love the house. They know, too, that the time has come to let it go. "Let’s do this while we still can," my mother said a while ago, though my father insists that he still has a few years of lawn mowing in him. It didn’t take long to set a price, find a buyer. My parents intend to retire to Florida and spend summers in Maine. How odd it feels, trying to accept the fact that my parents are leaving home, and we "kids" are the ones staying put, close to our roots. Next week, we’ll have one last family dinner to celebrate my dad’s birthday and say good-bye to my older son before he heads off for his sophomore year of college. And then my mother and father will begin the daunting task of packing, sorting, saving and tossing — trying to whittle a lifetime’s worth of accumulation, the vestiges of all our passions and pastimes, into a few condo-sized boxes.