Can This Be Real?

So we saw a few more properties on Sunday, all were quite nice but nah... not "the" ones. Feeling downhearted, I sat here surfing the online ads and came across one and you won't believe it.

It is in the building that my husband's family once owned and is the building where his mother and cousins and even where his grandmother was raised. The same building. I cannot even believe it. I'm sitting here baffled. I have been going into this building's courtyard since I met my husband in 1999, every time I came to Hannover each year since, I would sneak into the back of the house into the courtyard to admire the house. In the center of the courtyard is a large workshop. It was the one his grandmother worked in with her mother for years and years and years. And that workshop, which was once her dry cleaning business, is vacant and used as storage but is still within this courtyard. And you know what... the building with an apartment free overlooks the workshop. I'm feeling a little emotional about all of this. I think it's hormones. But I sat here for the past hour wondering if perhaps this could be a place for us - if there is not much competition for it, or if there is, I wonder if the universe wants us to live there. I wonder if I'll like it. It was once belonging to the family. And who knows, maybe if we live there we'll get to fulfill a part of my husband's dream as we used to walk, hand in hand, when we dated and he'd look up at the house and say, "One day I will buy that house back." Renting is the next best thing. I feel a bit childlike revealing so much to you, you must think I'm silly but for me, where I live and the whole emotional connection to home is a very deep ocean. Look at what I do for a living? Of course I put the greatest emphasis on my interior, not just aesthetics as that is only part of decorating, but the emotional connection, the family life, all senses are engaged when you are at home so there is much more to a happy home than how pretty you've made it. The very thought of living there, with a balcony overlooking her little workshop moves me so greatly I cannot really put it into words... But I know this: we're going to see this apartment tomorrow. If it is meant to be, it will. If not, at least I got the chance to see the interior of the home where so many family memories were made and that means something -- I've ALWAYS wanted to see the inside of this place and finally, I will. Yay! And it's empty so I am definitely bringing my camera and photographing it! (photo: holly becker - here is my husband's mother as a baby in the arms of her parents, his grandparents, whom he loved deeply. This is a poem he dedicated to his grandfather on his blog today, so very touching. And if you look at this, just below the baby, you see part of house in the image. That is his grandmother's shop. I photographed it and had it put into this mixed media collage for him as an anniversary present in 2006, commissioned by Michelle Caplan)