Our year of great transition continues as we relocate into Zelienople

When Brian and I moved into our Fombell home in 2017, we truly thought it was our forever home. Although as time progressed, we realized that particular house wasn’t going to be forever, we intended to stay there for many years, raise our children there and hopefully one day relocate to a different property in Fombell. Suffice it to say, we wanted to be Fombell residents for life.

On March 19, that all changed. Our world flipped upside down and inside out when Brian died. Life was shaken down to its very core and I knew without a doubt that staying in our Fombell home was not an option. Emotional reasons aside, maintaining a hilly, mostly wooded four acres is not within my skillset, particularly while raising two young boys.

With the guidance of a terrific Realtor and the help of dozens of people to spruce it up, I listed the home and had it under contract less than a week after listing. At the same time, I found a home in nearby Zelienople in a welcoming, warm neighborhood filled with young families.

Logistically, I couldn’t have asked for a smoother buying, selling and moving process. But processing the ramifications of our transition is a more complicated journey.

Memories of the Past

It is the home in which we moved into with so much hope and with so many dreams. It is the home in which we made our family. It is the home to which Landon came home from a 20-day NICU stay after a traumatic birth. It is the home Bryce came to after his polar opposite quick, but otherwise uncomplicated birth. It is the home we took refuge in during the early days of the COVID lockdown. It is the home in which I recovered from six of my eight hip surgeries.

But it is also the home in which tragedy happened and that provides fodder for my nightmares. It is where everything broke, where a piece of me died and our lives changed in a mere moment. The peace of our home, the place of refuge we viewed it as, broke that day, too.

The times we had on that property are both yesterday and a lifetime ago. The first spring Brian and I lived there, a mother deer and her triplet fawns would often come into our front yard each evening around dusk. Flocks of wild turkeys journeyed through as well. I once lost count after 20, and during certain times of year we’d hear them alarm calling in the woods. We had fox, coyote and, on one memorable winter night, a black bear. A great blue heron sometimes visited our pond. We housed ducks, chickens, goats and, for just a few hours, a sheep, some of which still remains vacuum sealed in steak form in our deep freezer.

Landon joyfully shadowed Brian to help care for the animals and took great pride in giving baby ducks water. He even showed his hidden skill of putting on his own shoes when Brian intended to slaughter Goldie the goat. I stayed inside with Landon and we were all shocked when the door slammed and I saw Landon run past the window toward Brian with his shoes on, which prior to he was adamant that he could not do himself. Brian walked Landon back to the house (thankfully pre-slaughter), we marveled at his newfound skill and from that day forward it’s been a feat to get him to stay inside if he doesn’t want to.

We rented excavators, skidsteers, wood chippers and other equipment for various projects around the yard and regularly borrowed our neighbor’s tractor to mow the lawn.

It was a place of great adventure and of mundane, ordinary moments that comprised our extraordinary lives. Some of my best memories are of sharing a cup of coffee in the back room while discussing our goals and dreams, ranging from the practical and short-term to the far-reaching, stretch ones. They are of introducing Brian to The Avengers series, sharing a new bottle of red wine and sitting in front of the roaring fireplace on a bitter winter night after the kids were in bed. They are of Elton John and Queen playing through the Alexa speaker outside as we did yardwork and Brian had meat slow cooking in the smoker. They are memories of living our lives as a family that worked together, played together and loved deeply and without boundaries.

Memories in the Making

Landon has handled the transition from Fombell to Zelienople with a grace that many adults likely couldn’t muster. I don’t know that he’s grasped the permanence of our move yet, but his enthusiasm and embracement of our new home is a joy to see. My parents helped make one of our last nights in Fombell memorable with a fire, complete with hotdog and marshmallow roasting.

Landon seems to love our new house and tells me several times a week how he doesn’t want to leave and that this is where he and Bryce will grow up. (“I’ve never grown up in Zelienople before!” he cheerfully exclaimed the other day.) Bryce continues to develop, is setting land speed records crawling and knows how to climb steps now.

We’re already taking steps to have a small garden in 2024. Landon even initiated filling up planters with the compost we worked so hard to create in Fombell and spread it in a new bed in Zelie. Brian would have been thrilled that we quite literally brought chicken and goat excrement, which I regularly complained to him about, with us.

It is so convenient to be close to where we regularly go anyway: daycare, preschool, the pool, park, library and more. I grew up in Zelienople and never imagined I’d raise my own family here, too, but there’s no place I’d rather do it in our current life circumstances. In a year in which life is out of control and where I have no say in what it throws our way, deciding where we will live and becoming part of this community is one area where I get to choose the course of our lives and where I have the ability to create a peaceful, happy home, albeit with the constant overtones of our sorrow.

The Enchanted Trail

In the final days before selling, I put on my boots, called Lexi and went for a final walk on the Enchanted Trail, which Brian built along the perimeter of our property and which we walked sometimes multiple times a day. Despite having only a partial season without maintenance, nature had already reclaimed nearly the entire trail. I doubt the new homeowners will ever find the whole thing. It is tragically and poetically fitting that the trail that Brian built also ended with Brian.

Fombell will forever be a part of us. As I sat on the hillside one last time looking down on our house with a pleasant breeze blowing through, a chorus of birds singing and sunbeams filtering through the wispy clouds, the tears flowed freely as I thought about how we were leaving our home and the unwanted circumstances in which we were doing so. But as Lexi approached me and nuzzled my face, I concluded the structure and property wasn’t what made our home. Brian, Landon, Bryce and I made our home. That house in Fombell was simply the structure in which we did so. Although we now live in a place where Brian has never set foot, his memory is just as alive and omnipresent in Zelienople as it was in Fombell. Brian still lives with us in memory, in spirit and in love.