I awoke the other night in the middle of a dream that I was about to move back into the house I originally grew up in. It was one of the best dreams of my entire life but in the middle of the night I couldn't help but wish it were true. How many people still live in the houses they grew up in? Does anyone else feel this same longing?
In my life, I have lived in 4 different houses, and 4 different apartments. Never has it been harder for me to leave any of them than it was to leave the house I lived and did most of my growing up in in Frewsburg, NY. It was a small three bedroom ranch with one bathroom. In the back was roughly an acre of land to play in and the very back and right sides were lined with pine trees that we used to crawl under and make bets as to who could actually climb to the very top of one. No one ever tried. My sister, Chelsea, and I both had our own maple trees that we would climb on summer days/nights and hide in during hide and seek. If you climbed close to the very top of Chelsea's tree you could watch the sun set in an opening of the leaves. On the other side of the pine trees were miles and miles of corn field. It seemed like miles and miles because it took forever to get to the other side. In actuality the entire length of the corn field was probably half a mile; a thousand miles to a 7-year-old.
The other day in the apartment I live in now, I was in the kitchen and I looked down at the floor tiles. For some reason I was hit with a wave of nostolgia but couldn't figure out why. After a couple of days spent mulling it over, I realized that the tiles in my apartment now are the same tiles that lined the floor of the first house's basement. Tiles that we tap-danced on. Tiles that we would slide on in our socks. And the carpet? It was this outrageous orange/red that somehow worked with the wooden paneling that lined the walls of most 90's homes.
Something that I think fondly of about sometimes is the land we played on. The big field that belonged to the people that lived on the corner of Frew Run and Carrol that never minded the hours we spent playing kickball in their field. The field that hosted a tree that dropped mysteriously huge seeds that no one could open. I can still smell them, green and potent, falling in the late summer. The field where Janelle kicked Jared in the testicles in third grade. The field everyone would meet at at the end of the school year to discuss who their teacher would be for the following fall. "You got Mrs. 'so and so'?! I heard she's got a knife in her desk and she smokes in the bathroom!!" God, what I would give to go back for just one day.
When I was 9, we moved to North Carolina and I haven't seen the house for a couple of years. I would give almost anything to own that house or visit it, or spend a day in it, though it wouldn't be the same. It never is. The only thing that ever stays the same in this world is change.
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