"Who Says You Can't Go Home?"

You know, they say you can never go back in time. But this weekend when we were in Rexburg we kind of did... (And in fact - we were listening to the radio on our way up there - and the song "Who Says You Can't Go Home?" - by Bon Jovi came on. It made us laugh.)

We drove up to Rexburg to see the temple (and I didn't get any pictures - darn it!) and to drive around the town to reminisce. We decided to drive past our old house - see how the outside of it had changed. As we pulled down the road we used to live on we saw several signs advertising houses for sale - and one with balloons and an OPEN HOUSE sign. We laughed and said - wouldn't it be funny if it was our old house? This was our first house we bought as a couple, and the house Cory grew up in (we bought it from his parents).

Well - the closer we got we realized that it WAS our old house that was on the market and that was having an open house. We pulled up in front of the house and teased that we should go inside. Cory finally was so curious that he decided to go for it. When he got inside he realized that the owners who bought it from us weren't around - it was just the agent who was showing the house - so he motioned for me to come in too.

So we went through the house. I was a little aprehensive because I was afraid that they probably would have changed things, and I was worried that I'd hate it. HA! The house was almost EXACTLY like we had left it almost 4 years ago - EXACTLY! Aside from our furnishings being missing (which was weird - it felt like I should be able to cozy up onto our couch and enjoy the entertainment system Cory and his dad had built years ago....) it was like a time-warp. We had gone back 4 years and nothing had changed.


Actually - that's not entirely true - they did take down the curtains that they fought me over (I wanted to take them, but they claimed that the real-estate agent said they stayed. I had places for them in my new house - but finally let them have them) and they put up lace curtains almost EXACTLY like the ones Cory's mom had up when we bought the house - that we took down when we moved in. Funny enough - all the curtains I couldn't care less about were still hanging...They also painted the master bedroom - get this - the EXACT color we had painted over when we bought the house. It was a pale pink color that Cory's mom had the room painted when they lived there. We laughed because the changes they had made had just un-done the changes we made when we moved in.


The back-yard looked pretty much the same except they had horses in the pasture, and we had not. The flower-beds had more flowers (since I'm anything but a green-thumb), and they had utilized the whiskey-barrels to plant flowers in. (Cory left the whiskey barrels I had bought earlier in the summer before we left - there wasn't room in our moving van and I had been sad ever since).


But it was really like going back in time, and was a bit surreal. Living in Rexburg seems like a whole different lifetime ago - even if it was less than 4 years ago. We didn't have kids, we didn't own The Blind Guy - things were different.


It was a good house for us, a good first place to live in and work on. We loved the painting we did, the wainscotting we stained and put up, the faux finishes we worked on - we loved the landscaping Cory had worked on - the fire pit and sitting area he built. I loved the quirky little things - like the basement with the LOW ceiling, or the tiny kitchen, or awesome wood-burning stove. What a great place. I'm glad in a way that they hadn't changed things - for just a moment we got to go back and remember that sweet time in our lives.