It’s time to say goodbye to This Old House.

And an old house it is: now more than a century old, as a matter of fact. Lots of original wood. Doorways at crooked angles. Creaks and groans — or croans and greaks, I dunno.

In a very small way, I’m maudlin about leaving. It’s our first home — or, rather, our first excursion into the American Dream of home ownership, which is probably a myth or at least a nightmare as much as it is a dream. Lots of good memories, here. And we’ve customized it to the nines. Laminate floors. Lots of paint. Better plumbing. Further, we arrived to find a barren 15% of an acre, and in that acre we fixed the grass and put up a stockade privacy fence and a deck walkway and a ton of flower beds. Even now our flower beds have gone apeshit despite the dry scorch of a summer — the crepe myrtles have exploded red, the clematis have taken over the fence, the butterfly bushes have brought the first official flock of butterflies — always two at a time, nuzzling the flowers, guzzling their nectar.

Yes, it is the flowers I’ll miss most.

Everything else, though, can suck it. Can suck it hard.

Hey, listen, sorry old house, but there’s a reason we sold your dumpy ass.

New House is the New Hotness.

The kitchen in the old house looks big until you realize it’s all odd angles and doorways and you have zero counterspace.

The attic is huge, but the rest of the house is small.

Two real bedrooms.

One bath.

And the neighbors suck. That’s right! You heard me, neighbors. You’re generally shitty. On our one side is the Crack Den, where children play amongst crumbling structures and rusty metal, where the porch looks like a paradise for termites, where they mow their lawn once per glacial epoch, where cats roam free and so do toxoplasmosis parasites. On the other side we have Casa de Witch Tits, featuring our insane old lady neighbor who thinks she’s a Hot Young Momma but is instead a Rancid Old Grandmomma, whose skin is so tan and so haggard it looks like a deflated basketball, whose mind is so paranoid she writes crazy signs on her lawn and puts bricks in the middle of a high-traffic road to “slow the cars down” and sprays weed killer all over our lawn because she thought we sprayed it on hers first (we did not).

Frankly, the whole town sucks. Two bike shops nearby makes for loud noise at 3AM. The local uniform seems to be tie-dye tees and camo pants. Half the houses are nice. Half the houses look like they have some form of architectural syphilis. The older residents are lovely. The younger residents are lovely. Everybody in the middle is cranky, trashy, don’t-give-a-fuck-nobody-no-how-gap-toothed-shit-wits.

And did I mention the cats?

The eighty jillion cats?

Owned by no one?

Fed by many?

All of them crapping in our flower beds and killing the birds we invite to the feeders?

We loved you, old house. Once upon a time. You and your pocket doors, which are like a siren’s song to my wife who could not resist your narcotic allure.

But now, we love a new house.

A house with a big kitchen and a glass backsplash and a window over the sink instead of a low-hanging head-cracking cabinet and lots and lots of counterspace (and an island, oh sweet Jeebus an island).

A house with scads of bathrooms — bathrooms everywhere you turn! And even better, a bathroom actually attached to the master bedroom! It’s insanity!

A house with bedrooms, bedrooms that will accept children and offices and the mythical “visitor” who comes in from afar.

A house with a fireplace.

A house with the laundry room upstairs, not downstairs in a dank nest surrounded by the frail machinations of spindly-legged cellar spiders.

A house with its own driveway.

A house with a garage at the end of that driveway.

A house ringed by woods — six and a half acres of forested goodness, with neighbors so distant you cannot see them, with no neighbors across the street at all — quiet and still but for the bugs and birds.

Best of all, it is a house unattached to any other houses, a house all by itself, a Big Boy House that, when occupied, makes us feel like we graduated from diapers to pants.

I can pull them up and down.

I’m a Big Boy now.

Yes, we’ll miss the flowers. We’ll miss the bigger fridge. We’ll miss the fence. But these are things we can bring to the new house, too. With time, it can all come back.

Fare thee well, Wendighaus, v1.0.

But it’s time to go.