Memories of a House No Longer My Home

My first encounter with the place is foggy to me. I was not even ten years old then.

While it wasn’t more than a twenty minute drive from the neighborhood that I had spent my first several years alive in, it may as well have existed in a wholly alternate universe, so far away it seemed.

It had three bedrooms, all of them much larger than those that the members of my family had formerly occupied, and common domestic spaces - e.g., a living room, dining room, kitchen, etc - that one imagines most suburban homes as having. There were also less tpyical features of the house: a full gym, accessible via a basement-skewed spiral staircase, and a cliff in the backyard that dropped onto a swampy valley where the banks of a river and trees atop it were visible in the distance.

We moved in on a Halloween evening in the fading aughts.

Selections:

1. It is my father’s birthday and I am in my late teens. He and his brother muse on shared moments from their early twenties to an audience of my friends and I. We’re all situated in the house’s garage, sheltered from the light rain that began hours earlier when the sun first set. As the brothers reach the climax of their story, the rain dissipates and ceases. Crickets stir. My father and uncle chuckle at their tale, as do my friends and I. What they speak of is, to us not-yet-adults, what we hope our approaching futures to be: wild, worthwhile, and better. This takes place shortly before my peers and I all leave for college, before most of us break apart and stop talking, entering adulthood individually. But, for the moment we share in the garage on that night, we enter a past that is simultaneously a hypothetical future.
2. My dog is sick. She’ll be dead in a few days but I don’t know it yet nor does anyone in my family, including the dog’s twin sister. About these dogs: they’re inseperable, always together since birth, both of them totally sweet and gentle, creatures that make the house warmer. After class, I’m walking in the backyard with the almost-dead dog and she’s sniffing some freshly sprouted weeds that have grown between cracks in the patio. I distract her from this, scratching behind her ears. She looks up at me with her blue eyes. Her sister meanders in the farthest reaches of the yard, near the cliff’s edge, sniffing at something I cannot see. In that moment, I am not thinking of what the almost-dead dog means to me; I’m essentially mindless, merely there. Days later, as I drive to the vet to see her off, I’ll recognize mundane moments like the one in my backyard as the dog’s legacy, a history of just being there - for my family, visitors, and I. For the house too, rarely outside of it except for the walks she was seldom taken on. I look at her looking at me and cannot miss her until it’s too late.
3. A hurricane strikes the town that I live in. The day of the storm is horror, all wind and water in an unbelievably fierce way. The tree in front of the house loses its largest limb while I’m helping my dad in the basement. We feel everything shake as the branch connects with the ground. My mother screams and we sprint upstairs to view the damage. My dad, a lifetime resident of our seaside municipality, says something about how he’s never experienced anything like this. The next day, after all has quieted, I bike to the neighborhood over and meet with a friend of mine. He and I go to the same elementary school. We’re both eleven years old. For the subsequent afternoon and evening, we ride around, hopping fallen live wires and talking with neighbors, everyone remarking on the post-apocalyptic appearance of our community. Since the power is out, everyone cooks the contents of their freezers, not wanting their food to spoil. A joint barbeque between households is held as we wait for order to be resurrected, something that will not occur for some weeks. As the world darkens, everyone returns home to light candles and be together. My dad retrieves an old portable radio powered by D batteries to listen to the news. I sit on the floor and shift my gaze from my parents’ faces to my sister’s to the dogs’. Somehow it feels like any other night.
4. One of my weekly chores is to mow the lawn. I get to it on a Saturday afternoon. While plowing through the tall grass in the backyard, something catches on the mower’s blade. I stop the machine and move it aside to see what I’ve struck: a garden snake, now split in two, both of its ends writhing. I panic and begin to cry. Within moments the animal’s halves stop moving. I pick them up with a shovel and place them elsewhere so I can finish my work. After the lawn’s trimming, I dig a grave in an area of the yard where the dogs won’t check and bury the snake. Later on, my mother gets home from running errands. She says that the lawn looks great. I tell her what happens and she comforts me, telling me to show her where the grave is. We have a small service for the deceased reptile, adding a makeshift cross to my poorly-fashioned plot. My mom makes a comment about the consequences of a job well done.
5. Every other month, I reorganize the contents of my bedroom. This includes furniture, books, decorations, etc. I do this to routinely feel like I’m living in a new place, like my life has more variety than it does and ever will. While my days are built of the same stuff - reading books, watching movies, completing assignments, hosting people - they are altered somewhat by this regular modification of my most personal setting. Each member of my family has helped me move things around before as have many of my friends. Everyone accepts this desire and helps me with it. And so it is that when I go to sleep each night after a moving, I am simultaneously an inhabitant of a house both old and new to me, a place that is mine but also not.

As of this week, the house is no longer my family’s. They’ve moved away from it, to a different town in a different county. My family is no longer rooted beside the sea; they are now people of the mountains, situated entirely inland. This has happened for a variety of reasons.

I’m grateful that I had a place to call home for as long as I did. The house takes on a new form without my family inside it, shifting from a collection of familiar rooms with familiar things in them into a structure of composed of years accessible mostly to my family and I, save these excerpts that I’ve shared here and those separately gathered by former visitors. From here on out, home takes on a different meaning.