I know they say you can't go home again, I just had to come back one last time.
I also know what you're probably thinking right now, reading this: Why am I writing a letter to a building?
It's been nearly a year since we sold my childhood home, and it's hard to say that I don't miss it. It's hard not to miss the place you called home for 14 years of your life, I guess.
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To me, the house I grew up in isn't just an inanimate building. It's where many of the best memories I hold on to occurred. It's where I spent 14 years of my life, growing from a messy-haired second-grader to a brace-face teenager, and up through my graduation from college and starting a new career.
The first day we moved into that house, I knew I wanted pink walls and a purple carpet in my bedroom--so that's what we did. Our kitten explored his new home as furniture began to fill the house, and mine and my sister's bikes were carried onto the back porch.
It needed some TLC, and that's exactly what we gave it. But it's the TLC that radiated from the people inside that made my childhood house a home.
The living room was the central hub to hang out by the big TV, or light up the fireplace if it got below 70 degrees out. There was almost always a Yankee Candle burning on the coffee table, infusing the room with seasonal scents--vanilla cookies at Christmastime, pumpkin or apple cider in the fall, a beachy scent for spring and summer. It's where we played fetch with the dog, piled up sleeping bags and blankets on the floor for sleepovers, emptied our backpacks to clean them out and where we sat to open presents on Christmas morning.
Christmas was probably the most spectacular time of the year at our house, though. With high ceilings in the living room, we always brought home a 7- or 8-foot Frasier fir Christmas tree--only the biggest and fattest would do. And each tree seemed to always fill that particular corner of the room perfectly, filling it with the smell of pine needles.
Each year our friends were excited to come and see the fully decorated tree that year, always amazed at how large it was. We would gather in the kitchen for cookies, listen to Christmas music on the TV or radio and talk about how it never quite felt like Christmas because it was just too hot out.
The den was the place where we played Guitar Hero, Sing Star, Dance Dance Revolution and video games on the Playstation 2. It's where the family computer was--which made it all the more fun to race my sister across the house to determine who got to play on Neopets first that day.
I could probably write a novel about my memories in that house, because that's how much it means to me.
That house is where my childhood friends and I gathered to play games, watch movies and stay up until the early-morning hours playing Nintendo DS. It's the place where my childhood cat would lie in the front lawn, keeping guard over "his" section of the neighborhood--later in his life, it's where we held him as he started to deteriorate, keeping him comfortable until he could be put down.
That house saw tears and countless laughs. It saw Bratz dolls and Barbies, Littlest Pet Shop and My Little Pony. It was there as two little girls grew up within its walls. It was the neighborhood safe place, hosted the best Christmastime atmosphere, saw numerous birthday and pool parties and tolerated kids rolling around the tile floors on Heelys.
It's where we spent hours studying for tests and exams, applying for colleges, doing homework and creating art projects and science experiments. It was where we practiced songs for chorus performances, played nails-on-chalkboard versions of songs on plastic recorders and spent hours meticulously crafting posters for our 4-H demonstrations.
It's where we trained our dog, buried multiple hamsters, cried over our cat eating a goldfish and laughed about it years later.
Our handprints in the driveway won't last forever, but the imprint that house left on my heart will. Above all, that house is where my family did life together for 14 years, and that is why I'll always have a place in my heart for the house that built me.
