The ad reads: Dream Home for Sale on 2.5 Acres. My friend is selling her dream home. This home had held so many promises. It was a home bought during a new marriage and a new start to life. This home represented my friend’s hopes and dreams for the future. My friend would sit on her deck and watch and listen to the birds. She would sit by her pond and watch her fish play and glide effortlessly in the water. She would sit and watch as her husband built the outdoor fireplace.

There were so many family parties around that fireplace on beautiful summer evenings. My friend planted a huge garden and surrounded her house with flower beds full of bright and beautiful flowers. It was her dream come true.

There has been a lot of road construction this summer. It seems everywhere we turn we have to take a detour. Sometimes the detour has a detour that leads us back to the beginning to start our journey over again. As I was driving those roads this summer and my path and destination kept changing, I realized that our life is like those detours in the road. We hit a lot of detours in our journey of life.

My friend is selling her dream home because life threw her one of the detours. Her husband died and her dream property is too much for her to take care of. My friend knows she has to let go of that dream and move on to see where this detour is taking her.

Moving is not easy. First, moving forces us to take a look at all the junk we have collected and determine if it needs to move on with us. If you don’t live alone and you have another person moving with you, there is the little tug and war on what to keep.

“Do you really need to keep that lump of coal that Santa gave you when you were 25?” “Well you don’t need to keep the bread wrapper from the first sandwich you shared with your old boyfriend.”

It is so hard to come to an agreement on what to keep and what to throw if there is more than one of you that is going to move. It isn’t about the object it is about the memories.

Every move we made resulted in repairing all the little things that you live with but put off fixing. The new owners got to enjoy the results of our repairs. Why do we do that and make ourselves live with the unfixed?

Some people are able to move forward with no sadness on the sale of their home. They seem to recognize that they are moving on to a new dream and a new life in a new home. I, however, never felt that way. I still can drive by my old houses and hear the houses speaking to me.

Selling a home isn’t always about the brick and mortar. Selling a home is also about memories. It might be a memory of sharing our first home together. It might be a memory of bringing our first baby home from the hospital. Or it could be a memory such as this: “Remember the time so-and-so got mad at the neighbor kids when he was 3, so he stood on top of the doghouse and peed on the neighbor kids? He liked revenge.”

It could be a memory of grandma always sitting by the fireplace when she came to visit. That was her spot. Now someone else would be sitting in grandma’s spot.

Leaving an old home for a new home is not always easy. When we sold one of our homes to move to another community, one of our sons who had moved out years before made the statement: “You sold my home.”

Even after he had left, it was still home to him.

Sometimes letting go of your dream home means that you are moving to places you would not always choose to move. Your move might be to a community where you do not want to be or to a nursing home where you need to be because you can’t be alone anymore. We run into detours that are not always easy to accept. But somewhere in those detours might be another dream if we only try and look for it instead of giving up.

If you run into the little detour of life called moving, I hope you will do what my friend did. She bought a house in a dream neighborhood with a dream neighbor. Me! I have to go now and see if she can come out and play.

Oh, and if you are looking for somewhere to move, her dream home on 2.5 acres is for sale.

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send e-mail to her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net. Listen to KBEW AM radio 1:30 p.m. Sundays for “Something About Nothing.”