Saying Goodbye to Abbey Place

We'll always love you Abbey Place!

We lived on Abbey Place for 11 years, 10 months and 21 days. It was inside of these walls that we laughed, slept, cried, screamed with delight, pounded our fists with frustration, spent thousands of hours talking with friends, hosted party after party, and lived our every day lives. Eating dinner in the living room, putting together jigsaw puzzles at the dining room table, making food to nourish our bodies and our souls in the kitchen, healed while lying in the beds, exercised while walking miles around the yard and the loop in the house. Writing screenplay after screenplay, studying, reading, posting, dancing, viewing, consuming, breathing, resting. So much resting. Abbey Place is where we met Betty, Bill, and Mary. Abbey Place is where we welcomed family from across the country and the continent. Abbey Place has been our home. And it has been an amazing home. It has been an amazing storage space for us with built-in closets and a garage and a yard. It is where we’ve grilled and grown food and washed our cars and watched the cats and hummingbirds for hours on end. It is where we felt safe. It is where our friends knew they could come when they needed to. It was always open and ready to receive. And now we have left it.

Moving is never easy. Even in the best of circumstances. You have to confront the why, the how, the details. At the very least you have to say goodbye. And then there’s the packing. And the cleaning. And the parting with what really should not go. And then you promise you will not forget. Because it’s rarely about the physical space. It’s always about the memories. The growth. The relationships. The stories.

I can tell you the exact spot where I killed every large spider. Some remains haunt the paint. Some remains haunt my mind. I can point out to you the plastered over wall where a termite popped out our first year there. I will never unsee the rats brought down out of the attic or the lizards under my bed or the earthworms in the middle of the carpet. The raccoons who played with the marshmallows in the trap outside instead of eating them will always have a place in my heart.

I know exactly where I was standing when Angela took my picture before I headed off to my first day of filming on The Couch. I think about how my dad drilled storage racks into the tiny bathroom our first night here. I knew right where to lie on my bed to get the sun on my legs but not on my face during the afternoon summers. I can tell you precisely where I was seated when my dear Trace called to tell me to go to the ER because she feared I had blood clots. I still smile as I think about every single conversation I had while seated around the table surrounded by people I love.

The backyard when we moved into Abbey Place

Moving is never easy. But sometimes it is exciting. When we moved from Yuma to Los Angeles on August 20, 2008 we knew an adventure was waiting. And that it has been. Jobs. Careers. Graduate degrees. Scripts. Web series. Relationships. Loss. Sickness. Healing. Life was rarely boring on Abbey Place. And when it was, we thanked God for that too. For the quiet winters when we locked up early, ate dinner at five and went to bed at nine-thirty. For the hot summer mornings that started before six because the sun was up and the trash trucks were on the move.

And this next move will be the best one yet, I’m sure of it. We’ve been pinching ourselves over the past three weeks (yes! all of this has transpired over just THREE WEEKS!). The world has changed, we’ve changed, our needs have changed. We can’t tolerate the increasingly hot weather as well as we once did. We need different types of exercise. We want more than just existence. We want comfort and happiness and contentment. And we pray that Club Cleon will be all of that and more.

There are checkmarks in both the plus and minus columns. We will no longer have a landlord. But we will be responsible for so much more. We will have air conditioning and a pool. But we will have more bills to fret over. We will not be where we’ve felt safe and comfortable for these past almost 12 years. But we will find that again. We are sure of it.

The backyard when we moved out of Abbey Place

This move came at the best time and the worst time. We are excited to create a space of our own we can thrive in for however long this pandemic endures. We can’t wait to have every single person we love and miss come visit and swim and eat and talk around the new, larger, dining room table. We were scared for movers and worker-type people to enter our walls. But we know this is the next step. This is what happens when you want more. When you work for and strive for more. You get more. And you work more. Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually. You tax yourself but you reward yourself.

We are so grateful for all Abbey Place has given us. And we can’t wait to learn what Club Cleon has in store for us.