Storybook Hill Series | Part 6
After finding the house that instantly felt like home, we toured it, made an offer, and were rejected. Or at least, that’s what happened on paper. If you’re new to the Storybook Hill series, start with Part 1: The Day I Found My Storybook Hill
We thought we’d spend my birthday weekend unpacking.
That was the plan.
After months of searching, negotiating, waiting, visualizing, packing, moving, and relocating what felt like an entire petting zoo, we were finally in the house.
The boxes were everywhere but the furniture was mostly in the right rooms.
The animals had survived the transition. Everyone was happy and healthy.
For the first time in a very long time, it felt like we could exhale.
We closed on our forever home October 10th.
My birthday is October 11th.
Our twentieth wedding anniversary was October 15th.
Could these events have been spread out over a more reasonable stretch of time?
Absolutely.
Did I intentionally stack a new house, a milestone birthday, and twenty years of marriage into the same five-day window?
Also yes.
For reasons I still can’t fully explain, I seem to have a talent for concentrating emotional significance. At the time, I was rather proud of myself. The timing felt almost poetic.
It seemed the Universe was completely on board with the plan.
I woke up in my new cavernous bedroom to a “Happy Birthday” from Dale. Through blurry eyes I could see the view out my window I had been visualizing for months. I heard Dale reach for his phone and say, “Why did your brother call me at 2:26am?”
Shit.
On my phone, sixteen missed calls from my siblings.
At first, I didn’t understand what I was looking at.
We didn’t have WiFi set up yet, and overnight my phone never rang.
No alerts.
No notifications.
Just sixteen missed calls and “call me when you get this” texts waiting for me when I finally looked at my phone.
When I called my sister, everything changed.
My mom was on life support.
To this day, I don’t remember much about the next few minutes.
Only fragments. The shock. The confusion. The feeling that somehow the floor had disappeared underneath me.
I remember my sister starting the conversation with, “Happy Birthday.”
I remember Dale rubbing my back.
I remember making coffee exactly like I had visualized doing it for months.
I remember climbing up to the catwalk and watching the sun come up over the valley.
And I remember a mourning dove sitting on the peak of the roof, staring directly at the house.
I looked at it and thought:
That’s her. She’s already gone.
Somehow I was able to dig through boxes to find sweats, a bra and shoes to drive the 3 hours north to the hospital.
The day before, we had been carrying boxes into our dream house.
Now I was throwing clothes into a bag and driving north.
I had spoken with my mom just days earlier about the closing, the final days of packing, confirming details for her visit to help me unpack.
She was genuinely excited for us.
In fact, when I first showed her pictures of the property months earlier, she laughed and said:
“Well, that would be a perfect place for my celebration of life.”
Which is an absolutely wild thing to say when your daughter is showing you her dream house. But my mom and I shared a dark sense of humor, so we laughed, agreed to it and moved on.
At the time, it felt like one of those ridiculous comments that gets made and immediately forgotten. Obviously now I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. It still makes me giggle.
She sounded lighter than she had in a long time. I even called Dale and said, “wow, that’s the best I’ve heard my mom sound in years.”
Healthier somehow. More at peace.
At the time, I didn’t think much of it. Now, I think about that conversation all the time.
It was the last time I heard her voice.
The next forty-eight hours felt suspended outside of normal life.
Time stopped behaving the way it normally does. Hospital rooms tend to have that effect. The hours stretched. Conversations slowed down. Entire afternoons seemed to disappear while a single minute could feel impossibly long.
Nothing seemed to matter except being there.
So that’s what we did.
We sat with her. We talked to her. We held her hand. We told stories. We laughed when we could and cried when we couldn’t. We ate Tres Leches cake for my birthday from the nearest Mexican restaurant.
And eventually, we said goodbye.
My mom passed away peacefully on October 12th, one day after my birthday and two days after we moved into Storybook Hill.
Nineteen years and three hundred sixty-two days after Dale and I got married.
The math of it still catches me sometimes.
Not because the dates mean anything in particular, but because they all sit so impossibly close together. One of the happiest weekends of my life and one of the hardest became permanently intertwined, separated by only a handful of days.
When I finally came home, the house felt completely different than it had just a few days earlier.
Dale and the kids had done their best to unpack most of the boxes. Bless them. I later discovered that every single kitchen drawer required reorganization, but grief felt like the wrong time to become a drawer tyrant, so I kept those opinions mostly to myself.
Mostly.
The furniture was still half arranged.
The walls were blank and unfamiliar.
It should have felt exciting.
Instead, it felt quiet.
Like life had split into a before and an after while I was gone.
As I walked through the house, I realized something that hadn’t occurred to me in the chaos of the previous few weeks: we would never have a memory with my mom here.
She would never walk through the front door and see it for the first time.
We would never sit at the kitchen island drinking coffee and “visiting” for hours, somehow covering the same stories we’d been telling each other for years.
She would never help me decide tell me where she thought I should hang pictures. Never ask, “Katy, who is going to clean all this?” while looking around at all the vacuuming she could do here.
And she’d never have the chance to hide cigarette butts in my flower pots and assume I’d never notice, despite the fact that I always noticed.
She would never get to enjoy it.
For a while, that realization broke my heart.
Not because the house suddenly felt less special, but because I had imagined sharing it with everyone, including her. Somewhere in all those months of dreaming and planning, I’d quietly assumed there would be time for that.
There wasn’t.
But alongside the sadness was something else I struggle to explain.
Because as much as I wished she had gotten time here, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had somehow waited and given this as a final gift.
Waited until we got the house.
Waited until we were settled.
Waited until I had a place spacious enough to gather family, to fall apart, to heal.
Maybe that’s just something grieving daughters tell themselves.
I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is that as disheartening as it felt to realize we’d never share a memory with her in this house, I also felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude that this was the place I would learn to live without her.
If I was going to walk through a season like that, there was something comforting about doing it here.
For a while, I wasn’t sure what to do with that.
How could I feel grateful and heartbroken at the same time?
How could I celebrate something I’d dreamed about for months while grieving?
It felt disorienting.
Like my nervous system couldn’t decide whether we were celebrating or mourning.
One minute I was standing in the house I’d spent months dreaming about and visualizing. The next, I was grieving the person who would never get the chance to see it.
And boy, did my body lock up because of it.
My shoulders practically lived somewhere near my ears for months.
I was exhausted but couldn’t rest.
Grateful but heartbroken.
Certain I’d gotten exactly what I wanted and completely unable to enjoy it the way I’d imagined.
The truth was, I was doing both.
And while part of me believed my mom had somehow given me this house to heal in, it still felt unfamiliar.
The farmhouse had held a decade of memories.
This house was still new. Beautiful and peaceful, but new.
The farmhouse had witnessed a decade of my life. It knew my routines, my coping mechanisms, my weird habits, my heartbreaks, and my tendency to dramatically reinvent myself every few years.
Storybook Hill didn’t know any of that yet.
I didn’t know her rhythms, and she didn’t know mine.
Less than thirty days after moving in, we hosted my mom’s celebration of life at Storybook Hill.
And as strange as it sounds, it felt right.
Not fair.
Or ideal.
Certainly not the way I imagined any of it.
But right.
At one point, because humor has always been my family’s preferred coping mechanism, I joked: “Well, two birds, one stone. Housewarming and funeral.” Which sounds absolutely unhinged until you’ve met my family.
But there was something beautiful about it too.
Looking back, those first few weeks in the house were uncomfortable in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time.
I was grieving.
Exhausted.
Disoriented.
Trying to find my footing in a place I’d dreamed about for months but barely knew.
And somehow, by opening its doors to the people we loved, the house started becoming familiar too.
Two hundred people walked through those rooms.
They shared stories. Laughed. Cried. Ate. Hugged each other in hallways we’d barely walked down.
Nothing accelerates the settling-in process quite like inviting two hundred people into your home though. My mom would have appreciated the efficiency and cleanliness of it.
But more than that, something shifted.
The house didn’t sit empty waiting for the perfect moment.
It immediately became what homes are supposed to become.
A gathering place and a refuge. A container for people we love.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, we built a relationship.
A trust.
Storybook Hill stopped feeling like a beautiful house I’d managed to buy and started feeling like a place that could hold me.
The farmhouse had spent ten years witnessing my life.
Storybook Hill earned my trust in less than thirty days.
And over the months that followed, she held me so gently that sometimes it felt like she’d stepped in where my mom left off.
Continue Reading: Part 7 – What Nobody Tells You About Manifestation
