Steven LaChance Blog

We are in our last two weeks living in Playa del Carmen. In a little over a week the movers will be here, and after that we will head to Querétaro. Lately, our days have been spent going through things, deciding what still belongs with us and what has quietly finished its time. That part has been easier than I expected, which in itself has told me something.

This week, everything came down off the walls.

I had been expecting that moment to feel bigger than it did. Even though I am excited about the move, I assumed taking everything down would feel like a line being drawn. Like leaving one home for another should come with a kind of emotional punctuation. I was ready for that feeling.

It never really arrived.

After the walls were bare, I walked into the large open downstairs and stopped. The house looked different immediately. Not in a dramatic way. It simply felt stripped of personality. Without the photographs, the art, the small familiar things, it became clear how much of what I thought belonged to the house had actually come from us.

Standing there, it hit me that the house itself was never what I was attached to. Once everything that reflected our lives was gone, the place revealed itself plainly. It was a structure that had done its job. It sheltered us. It held our routines. But it was never the source of what made it feel like home.

That came from living inside it.

From the way days unfolded. From conversations that did not need planning. From time passing in ways you do not notice until you look back. When all of that was no longer visible, the truth felt obvious and strangely comforting.

What I thought would be an emotional ending turned into a quiet reminder. Our next home will become home the same way this one did. Not because of where it is or what it looks like, but because of who lives there and how life fills the space once we arrive.

That realization changed how I felt about leaving. It did not feel like loss. It felt like movement. Like carrying something forward rather than closing something behind me. The house is already letting us go, and I think that is how it should be.