Home

My parents are moving to. After eighteen years on Evanson St. they’re packin’ it up and shippin’ out of the big city. It’s weird to think that my childhood house will be occupied by strangers in less than one week. I wonder how long it will take them to discover the initials I carved into my bedroom closet door ... where Ric and Ronnie will live forever surrounded by tiny imperfect hearts. Or where my brother and I measured our height on the basement pillar. Or the dent in the floorboard on the stairs where I fell and broke my foot when I was twelve. Or the bright yellow handprints under the carpet in the veranda from when my dad and I painted in 1989.

The concept of home is a funny thing ... weird funny, not ha-ha funny. Home is a place in which you not only live and experience, but where you leave a piece of yourself. Where you’re always surrounded by the things you experienced there, but that you can’t pack up with the kitchen utensils to take with you when you leave ... but you don’t need them anymore, anyway.

I certainly don’t need the awkwardness that is steeped into those walls from my puberty years. I don’t need the teenage embarrassment or incomprehension that still lingers in the tiny cracks of my first bedroom. I don’t need the myriad of pain or angst from unrequited love or some other boy-related issue that is probably still stuck between the hardwood floors from all the tears I shed over it.

I don’t need to be surrounded by these things ... because I remember them. I remember the humility and pride and guilt and discovery and confidence and skepticism and love and sadness and everything else that a person feels when they grow. I’ve carried these feelings with me ... stashed away neatly into far corners of my heart to be accessed when I want to put myself in the shoes of a thirteen year-old, or when it’s brought out involuntarily by a song or a smell and it makes my stomach flutter and my heart swell for the girl I used to be, and who still lives within me. I’m brought back to those feelings and experiences all the time, and now they help me with the things I face in my life today.

I’ll miss that house on Evanson St.

I’ll miss the house, but I know that I’ve already taken the home with me.