It’s that time. The time for boarding planes and bearing the snow in order to make my way home.
Home.
Home is sometimes in a backpack. Sometimes in my head. Sometimes in California. But always in Addison, Illinois. It’s the place where I learned the beginnings of everything. As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever choose to settle there. But now I see Addison as much more than an insignificant suburb just west of Chicago. It’s my mold, my cookie cutter, my frame. My parents taught me, but my house and my town sculpted me. If I had grown up anywhere else, I can’t imagine what I’d be like. Classier, maybe. More well-read. But I definitely wouldn’t know as much about Greeks and Italians. I wouldn’t know the ins and outs of a tanning bed. And I surely wouldn’t know that it is possible to buy cigarettes from a drive-thru. Whoever I am now was planted and watered in Addison, just like the tree my mom put in our back yard the day I was born. Or maybe the day after, since I don’t quite imagine her zipping home after birthing to plant a tree.
Addison is my roots, and so is my childhood home on Yale Avenue (or Street– we never figured out which). For years I hated that house. It was never good enough even though it was totally good enough. But now that I’ve discovered my love for it, it’s too late. My mom has decided to sell it, and this will be the last Christmas I ever spend at home.
I just gasped when I wrote that.
My house has always been there. And now it won’t be there.
It’s not that I won’t have a home, but I really won’t have a home.
There’s something about a childhood town though that makes it forever home. The faces of the houses. The way you can ride to yours with your eyes closed in the back of the car and know when you’ve turned onto your street by the curve of the drive and the shadows of the trees on your eyelids. The way each corner or alley reminds you of junior high bus stops or bike rides or games of kick-the-can. The way you know each house by its family’s last name even if they haven’t lived there in years. This town and this location are not just home. They’re a lifetime. They’re childhood. They’re me. My adolescence is stuffed into each sidewalk crack and garage hiding spot. But soon a sign in the front yard will offer it up to a new family who will paint over all my memories with their own.
I don’t like this feeling. It’s abandonment. It’s fear. It’s sudden. Something that’s always been there will never be there again. I can always come back to the town, but I’ll have nowhere to stay. I don’t want to let it go. But some things and some dreams and some people have to go away. It’s time for a new era and new memories and for me to finally be a grown up. Fuck. I don’t want to be a grown up.
I’ll have to make a list for the new family. I should tell them of all the treasure I’ve dropped down the heating vents and to make sure to water my tree in the backyard and how you can sneak out onto the roof at night and really feel silence and how you can hear the house creak when you’re sad as if it feels your pain and if you sit in the upstairs closet where my dad’s leather coat hangs, it smells just like him. My house knows. You can see its scars and its character if you peel back all the layers of wall paper. Orange flowers in the seventies, black stripes in the eighties (sorry about that– my idea), shiny blue in the nineties. Hey, house, remember when you had shaggy carpet and I would hide in the corner with the scissors and give you a haircut? Remember the baby birds that were born in Grandpa’s construction hat in your garage? Remember when Grandma chased me around your backyard with a paddle until she was laughing too hard to continue? Remember when I rode my tricycle down your stairs and broke my collarbone? Remember when I took baths with an umbrella and turned on the shower? You knew I was a genius then, didn’t you?
Too many memories. Thirty years full.
Am I crying because those memories are gone or am I crying because there’s nobody left who can share them with me? Just my fleeting house, my beautiful creaking house.
I know memories are more powerful than siding and windows. I know I don’t need my house to delight in the deliciousness of my past. But it’s too much of me to shed without a fight– so hard to let go. Letting go. Maybe that should be my lesson for the new year. I can learn to let go.
I can let go.
Or I can buy the house.
I’ll think about it.
Home. The place where I told my mom both that I never wanted to live without her and that I hated her.Also the scene of my first kiss and several crazy parties– sorry, Mom.
{ 109 comments… read them below or add one }
Well put once again, friend. Enjoy your last Christmas at your childhood home. I'd be bawling my eyes out too – and am even though it's you not me.
I'll be thinking of you – have a cigarette, a beer and a hugout w/your mom. For old time's sake.
xoxo,
Carrie
In Ohio, you can buy beer in drive-thrus. Oh, Midwest. How I enjoy flying over you on my way to other places.
I felt this way when my grandfather moved out of his home a few years ago. He and my grandma spent 50 years of marriage there. I lived with them for a while when my parents were separated, and my grandma and I would stay up late watching "Golden Girls" and eating Klondike bars. I hope someone who lives there now gets the "Golden Girls" box set for Christmas. The house really loved the dynamic between Sophia and Dorothy.
This? Is beautiful.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
this made me cry… a little… you can always stay with my parents!
i always freak out thinking about my mom selling my childhood home (and her childhood home too). however, as i get older and realize that i probably won't move back closer to home, i'd much rather my mom sell the house and move closer to where we can be a family- which is something we've talked about. i've realized that home isn't necessarily the house.
Oh gosh this rings so true. My parents live in the same house we moved into (and my dad designed and build himself) when I was 5.
But have you also noticed you can never go home? I could never move back to the suburbs of Detroit – it's different, I am different. It makes me sad when I think about it because it was such a wonderful place to grow up. It's just not a place I want to live in as an adult.
This is gorgeous writing Laurenne. Gorgeous.
And the wonderful thing about being a writer is we never really lose anything. We keep it alive and vibrant through the stories we tell.
Your home will always be a character in your life stories. It will never be lost.
The drive-thru cigarette place that used to be Long John Silvers…still next to the funeral parlor. I think the drive-thru sign is the same.
My parents sold their house a few years back, and I was really upset about it. It was a crappy little thing on Army Trail Blvd. (As with your Yale dilemma, I'm not sure where the cut off was where Blvd. became Rd.) that I hated growing up…and yet everytime I go to Addison to visit my parents, I have to drive by the old place just to check it out, even though it's out of the way.
I'm afraid I'm too young to relate to the selling of a childhood home.
However, a few years ago, my mother, my brother and I moved back into her childhood home in Suburbia, Minnesota. My grandpa built the house and most of the neighborhood with the other men in the neighborhood. We still have his ashtray on the porch. When she lived here as a child, there were cat tails lining the lake in the back yard. There weren't any fences and the trees weren't as big. Her and her sisters knew every child in the neighborhood.
My grandma owned this house through my childhood. We lived here when we had no-where else to go. I spent some of the happiest days of my childhood here. And after my grandma died, and we couldn't afford to pay her estate due to a will fluke, we were forced to put the house for market.
I didn't realize how much I loved this house until I thought I was going to lose it. I'm not sure if it was that, or that we didn't have anywhere to go after we left. But I found myself cherishing the whiff of Esdee Lauder when you walk through the door – still – and the musty smell of the closets and the randomly placed brick wall in our living room and the shag carpeting in the basement.
Thankfully we bought the house. And I'm hoping my children – my mother's grandchildren – will halfway grow up in this house, too.
Long comment is long. I like this post. That is all.
Oh NO! I'm a bad commenter friend, very late. I blame all these pagan holidays.
You had a house where you could sneak out onto the roof? Lucky. It was like your very own TGIF show. Man, you must have had a friend named Steve Urkel too, oh sorry, Stefan Erquell.
I wish I had a birth tree and that I could write something like this. No, I'm not crying it's just raining on my face.
I really feel like crying for you right now! I am so sorry.
I can identify with you somewhat. My husband's childhood home was sold this year because his parents divorced after almost 39 years of marriage.
I can relate….my childhood home just a few blocks away on Michigan Ave was sold 2 years ago. The feeling of loss you so perfectly described was mixed in with the awfulness of loosing my father just months before. We will always have the memories of our town, the Zayer that is now a Hispanic grocery store and a the Pink Pony that is long gone. We knew that you could buy cigarettes at Pantry One without an ID when you were only 16 and how cool it was to work at Marcus when it first opened! I hold the memories of our town near and dear and the same is true of our friendship. You're never alone my dear friend!
Thank you. My mom wants to sell our house.. it's been a bit of a fight.
I loooooove this post. I was so begrudging about going home for Christmas. I wish I'd had more of your tenderness. Maybe I can ask my parents to pretend they are selling their house next year and then I will have all these mushy feelings about the night my dad got drunk and… oh….. wait…. Maybe I can find something else to be mushy about.
my parents did that to me in 2006. sold our home of 36 years. assholes. now i have to call LA my home…
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