Saying goodbye to our home

Letting go to gain freedom

Words by Shannon Colton

My husband and I just sold our home where we’ve raised our family for the past ten years. It’s been a lovely home for bringing up our kids—in a neighborhood where their schools have been within biking distance as they progressed from elementary to middle to high school.

We have many fond memories from living in our home over the years: birthday parties; sleepovers; Easter egg hunts; water balloons, slip ’n slides, and cookouts in the summer; growing fruits, vegetables, and flowers in our garden; Halloween trick-or-treating; decorating for the holidays; and having fun with firecrackers in the backyard for New Year’s and the Fourth of July.

I’m grateful for this stable home we had while rearing our family. As we are approaching an empty nest with our youngest going off to college this fall, my husband and I decided to take advantage of this time when we no longer need to be settled. By selling our home (and our cars and all our stuff), we are freeing ourselves up to go on an adventure.

For the foreseeable future, “home” will be wherever my husband and I are in the world as we travel nomadically and where our kids will visit us during their school breaks. Looking back, we are thankful for the home we’ve had for the past ten years and for all the memories we made there, and now we are grateful to be able to embrace our new freedom.

Goodbye home, and thank you.

Shannon Colton

Shannon Colton lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Back when Shannon was just starting out as an adult, she moved west from her home state of Virginia to California with her now-husband Paul for adventure and opportunity. Embracing uncertainty during that move west as a young adult felt like the right thing to do and taught her to follow her intuition and listen to her gut, which have come in handy for her most important job: raising her two teens to become healthy, independent adults.

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