We have passed an important milestone on our retirement journey.

The place we called “home” for 21 years is now just a house. It’s a building. It’s making feel vaguely strange to think of it in those terms, but that’s what happens when we move on to the next big adventure.

Our southwest Amarillo home is now virtually all packed up. It’s full of boxes and big pieces of furniture. I walk into it to do more work and are filled with this a mixture of bittersweet feelings.

The sweetness comes with the knowledge that we are going to move to a new location somewhere near our granddaughter … and, of course, her parents and her brothers. The bitterness is part of the realization that the place where hung our hats for more than two decades — far longer than anywhere else either of us ever have lived — no longer is our “home.”

Don’t misconstrue that the “bitter” part of the bittersweetness. It’s only a minor element. We didn’t rear our sons there. We moved to Amarillo when our boys were in college. One of them moved here after graduating from college in 1995; the other son stayed in Dallas after his graduation from college.

But I do have two specific memories of living there. They occurred early on.

Our first Christmas, three days after closing on the purchase in December 1996 is one of them. We spent the holiday unpacking boxes and rediscovering items we had kept in storage for nearly two years after moving to Amarillo in early 1995. The other memory occurred on Valentine’s Day weekend 1997, when we took delivery on fescue sod which my wife and I laid down on our yard. I remain quite proud of the job we did that weekend. Not very romantic, but it surely was productive.

But that was then. Today we are moving at an accelerating pace toward the next big step in our life journey together.

I am anxious and ready.