The Old House

The Old House

Knowing I’d pass through the town, I looked up our old house online. When I first saw it, I checked the address, it had to be wrong. But it was right. As I sat looking at the tiny house, I began to see things that actually were right.

It had been quite a while. Realizing suddenly that I had left that house so many years ago, I laughed. I always thought of it as my childhood home, I’d lived there till I was eleven. How did I make eleven years represent my whole childhood?

In my mind our house had been huge. I knew everybody there, every family, every child in our neighborhood. There was a large field next door where we all played on summer nights. In the picture, a tiny house, the house next door had an undersized lot between, my imagined field. The neighborhood was on the end of the street with a huge factory beyond that you could see from the house, now I remembered it. Our small backyard butted right up to the small back yard of the tiny house on the next street over.

How could I have remembered that place so wrong? But I knew. It was because I belonged. I belonged in that house, in that neighborhood, at that school. I never had to try and “fit in” because I was already a part of the whole. I was solid. Only when we moved did I become the outsider. After that, I never felt I really “belonged” again. All this became clear as I sat gazing at that house on my computer.

That was my childhood. That place colored everything I did, every day since. Remembering being there still made me smile. I decided not to drive by after all.