We’re Selling Our House

We’re selling our house.

Yesterday we cleaned the deck, and the leaf blower died. Then the second battery died too. We cleaned the pool, and when I jumped in, the little leaves hiding under the empty skimmer basket came back out. So we cleaned it again. While we were swimming, it started raining leaves.

Less than half an hour after we got out, the wind and rain came through and knocked over our bougainvillea arch. I looked out from inside at the branches and leaves and sticks all over the deck and in the pool.

That’s our norm. We leave, come back, and clean leaves; get up and clean leaves; blink and clean leaves.

For the first eight months, we talked about it differently. We said things like, “At least it’s not shovelling snow,” or, “At least it’s not minus twenty.” Comparing it to our old life made it better for a while. Our good old Canadian need to show appreciation for what we had was still shining through the grey moments.

But the longer we stayed, the more Canada’s story gave way to Mexico’s. We stopped measuring each hard day against a winter storm and started asking, “Is this a good day for us in Mexico?”

It didn’t matter anymore that we weren’t shovelling snow. We were still spending so much of our time cleaning, fixing, waiting for workers, managing the pool, and trying to get everything back to normal. Normal never lasted very long. We’d fix something, and something else would break. We’d finish the yard, and the wind would come. It felt like we were spending all our energy returning everything to zero.

We left offerings for the Aluxes and tried to find a rhythm with the place, but we couldn’t seem to settle into it. We were doing the motions of living without always getting to live.

Lately, the podcast had started to sound the same. Heather and I recorded two episodes and deleted both. They were complaint fests. We were too hot inside the emotions, I guess. We talked about the problems and all the technical things, but never got to what any of it meant.

Then last night, we sat on the couch with the mics and finally got somewhere. Afterward, we kept talking. How had we ended up with a list of complaints long enough to fill two episodes? Why were we booking excursions away from our lives to catch a break?

Then we started talking about why we moved.

We wanted more time outside, walking and exploring, learning Spanish. We dreamed of walking to the market every day and buying fresh food. We wanted a happy, healthy life with less stress. We wanted to live longer together and make the absolute most of our remaining years.

Our goals hadn’t changed. We’d just lost sight of them.

We decided we had to sell the house. It wasn’t supporting the life we wanted.

And once we said it, we started talking about what it would mean to shut the door for the last time. This beautiful, comfortable house that we truly love would still be here, and we wouldn’t be coming back to it.

We talked about our vecinos, and how we might never see them again. Never hear Juan’s singsong “Bueno” when he leaves our home. Never get to prove to Margarita that our Spanish got good. One day we’d eat the tacos from the corner for the last time. We talked about the purple cart and all the amazing bumpy laughs we’d had with it.

I’d spent so much time wanting relief from this house that I didn’t expect leaving it to feel like grief.

This is where our life in Mexico began. At first, we could barely explain what we needed. I remember the fourth, or maybe the tenth, plumber coming over. We were trying to say the water kept shutting off and we’d confirmed it wasn’t the water company. He looked confused. When he spoke to clarify, the app couldn’t understand him.

We tried to find one that understood Yucatecan-flavoured Spanish. Pro tip: it doesn’t exist.

Eventually, we worked out that he thought it was normal, probably the water company. He’d completely missed our point. We stopped relying on the phone and powered through a lot of charades and Spanish lessons until we could explain what we needed. We had a tinaco installed.

Now we never take the phone out.

I can look around and see stories in the pipes, the toilets, the pool, and the yard. During all those repairs and upgrades, we learned how differently we ran as Canadians. We learned about the mañana rhythm, how a five-minute job could turn into a month. We learned to give workers water and check the work, not the workers. What we thought was polite checking in could feel like hovering to the people working in our home.

Some of those people became part of our normal life without us noticing they were becoming important characters in our memories.

This is where we learned about Mexican food and found the best tacos. Where we made a life that was completely ours, one that became harder to explain to our friends and family. We painted the house purple, bought a jungle, and finally got the right couch. We started the stories and the podcast here. We started catching the hum.

We’re damn proud of what we built. Leaving feels like walking away from dreams we haven’t finished yet, pulling ourselves out of a time that still means so much to us.

But every time we talk through what we love, we also remember the grit it took to have it. Almost every day has felt like a fight with leaves, broken things, or finding the right person to do the work. Then we come back to what we wanted retirement to feel like. Ease. Exploration. More life outside the house.

Selling the house doesn’t mean it was a mistake. It doesn’t mean we didn’t love it. It means the life we built here is no longer the life we want to spend all our energy maintaining.