Finding Home

“I’m not sure I remember how to get there.”

“Does anything look familiar?”

“Well.” I sighed, looking around, trying to overlay childhood memories on top of the bustling storefronts on either side of the road. To the right, is that the same building the old supermarket was in? The building seemed old enough, about the right size and shape. Though the hardware store occupying it was new. Well. New-er. “Maybe?”

I turned a corner and had to slow down for a family of wild turkeys.

“Whoa, cool,” the girls gasped in awed stereo from the back.

“Okay. That’s familiar,” I chuckled. “Though this all used to be woods, not all these stores.” I gestured to either side of the road with my chin, though my husband barely noticed, entranced by the large male, puffed up and fronting on the rental car as if he thought he could take it despite the huge size difference. Yeah. That definitely hadn’t changed.

“So, is this where you and grandpa used to walk to the store and look for soda cans?” my oldest asked.

“It must be,” the youngest answered, “there’s the wild turkeys and I think that was the store back there.” She pointed over her shoulder at the hardware store.

“Yes, this looks like the right place, honey.” Just passed the wild turkeys and the bevy of stores, a group of familiarly shaped houses beyond a length of worn and weathered wood fence came into view and the memories poured in, coating them in colors and newness they no longer featured. I sighed, “definitely the right place.”

My husband patted my knee and smiled proudly. “I knew you’d find it.”

I laughed. “I haven’t been here since I was eight years old and I’ve never driven around here. Glad someone has some confidence in my memory.”

He laughed. “There is something to be said for retracing a path you’ve been over a hundred times, even if you only walked them or rode your bike,” he grinned at me, then added wistfully, “the body remembers.”

I nodded, turning off Old Auburn Road onto Wooddale. “Lauralyn should be right up…”

“There it is!” The girls screamed and sure enough, the street sign with Lauralyn Way came into view.

I slowed as I turned the corner, trepidation washing over me like a chill from a passing ghost. What if it isn’t there anymore? Some of these houses have changed. My thoughts whispered their usual negativity, but I nodded towards Smoley Way on the right and the cul-de-sac beyond, “that’s where my friend Steven and Big Ryan lived.”

“The one with the Millenium Falcon?”

“Yes, sweetie. Steven had a huge Star Wars collection. I was so jealous, especially of that Millenium Falcon.” I laughed, remembering so many summer days spent playing with the boys and arguing over which of us got to be Han Solo. They always wanted me to be Princess Leia, since I was a girl and would know best how to play her, and I always had to insist that if I agreed, then I got both, plus Chewbacca, because they were a couple after all and Chewie never went anywhere without Han. I usually won.

Then pointing to the left, “Down that way, Little Ryan, Jeffrey and his sister Jennifer, and Tonya all lived. My elementary school was way down at the end and to the left, passed Wooddale. Little Ryan and Robbie both lived over here on Lauralyn.”

“And Snowball, from your autograph book?” my little one asked, dark eyes blinking at me expectantly in the rearview.

I chuckled, “this house right here was Scotty and Snowball’s.”

My oldest started bouncing in the seat and pointed to the white house next door, “then this one is yours!”

I pulled up in front of the two-story white house with black trim, just as I remembered. Well. Almost. “Yeah. This one was mine.”

The car went quiet and unusually still as I took it in. The paint was peeling. Some of the windows were broken. My Dad’s rose bushes were gone, the lawn mostly dead, and a very clear, yet weathered Condemned sign hung on the front door.

“You, okay?” My husband’s hand found its way to mine.

“Yeah, it's…it's just so much smaller than I remember.” I pointed upwards to the window in the far corner of the second floor. “That was my room. The one painted blue. This other one still had the pink when we moved out.”

“What’s the sign say?” a small voice from behind me asked.

I couldn’t answer. The word caught in my throat.

“Condemned,” my husband answered for me, squeezing my hand sympathetically. “It means no one can live in it right now.”

“It must be so lonely,” the youngest whispered loudly and the tightness forming around my heart squeezed harder.

“I wonder how long it’s been empty,” my oldest murmured.

“Long enough for the grass and pretty much everything else to die,” my husband answered.

I don’t know for sure how much longer we sat in front of that house, so different from the view I was seeing through the filter of childhood memories. The girls goaded me to recount stories of how my best friend, Tish, who lived across the street and all the neighborhood boys would play in the street and the big field that had once filled the area passed my house and Tish’s.

I didn't share the one that haunted me most as we sat there, just behind where the ambulance had parked at the edge of the yard and in front of where the firetruck had sat partway into the driveway. I glanced across the street at the house where my best childhood friend had lived, where I'd been playing when everything had happened. Her brother's face, ghost pale as he'd rushed in to tell me there was an ambulance at my house and that he thought he'd heard someone say it was for my Mom.

I didn't tell them about how I'd run across the street to find my way blocked by strangers, firemen in big boots and suspendered pants yelling at me to stay out. I didn't share the pain and fear and confusion that still echoed from the doorway I'd stood in crying until someone had finally recognized that I belonged to that house, to the people in it.

I looked down the street and gulped a deep breath of air to settle my thoughts back to the present.

There were houses there now where the big field used to be and Lauralyn no longer dead-ended at the redwood fence my Dad had built. That fence had helped us save the house and my bunny, Easter, from a fire that had blazed through the dry summer field. Now it leaned at a sad, lonely angle, darkened by age and neglect.

The flowering plum tree that I had climbed and got stuck in no longer stood in the middle of the front lawn that I used to lay in to catch fireflies in jars. The sweet scent of roses and strawberries no longer clung to the air, and without seeing, I was certain there was no longer a gigantic garden in the backyard from which my Mom would make jellies and pickles. No longer the swing set where I would fight for possession with the bees and dragonflies that had liked to warm themselves on the bright metal.

“Do you want to go look in the windows?” my husband asked gently.

I shook my head slowly. “I’d rather keep the memories,” I whispered.

Then I shook myself, wiped a stray tear from my cheek, and asked brightly, “you want to see if my elementary school is still there?”

“Yeah!” both girls cheered.

We went back some years later, the girls grown into pre-teens. Someone had bought the old property and rather than tear the house down as I’d expected, had completely remodeled it. Fresh paint glistened in the sun, the deep green lawn hummed with bees, and the air bustled with dragonflies flitting from one corner to another. My Dad’s redwood fence had been repaired and re-stained.

His rose bushes were still gone, and the flowering plum was still missing, but as we sat there the sweet scent of roses and strawberries drifted to me anyways. I looked up at my old bedroom window as the ghosts of my childhood stood beside the mother I had lost in that house. They gazed out at me through new windows, smiling down at the granddaughters she’d never met, content once more in the house she and my Dad had built.

A house loved once again and no longer alone.