Every time I take the exit toward home, the excitement begins to build. Construction has changed the look and function of the freeway exit over the years, but the feeling of nearing home never changes. I am antsy waiting through the stop lights taking me nearer toward home; they are inevitably red and each stop feels never ending.
Then we – finally – make our way up the hill to the winding, forested area. The car passes under the bridge, then past the park I played in as a child. I experience an odd mix of relief and anticipation as I take in the gorgeous flowers and gaze up at the magnificent trees. After years of living away, an awe always comes over me that I grew up amidst the natural grandeur of the Northwest. We finally reach our last stoplight, turning down the hill toward home, and I sit forward for a better view of the road ahead.
I glimpse a view of the Puget Sound, a blue beauty in the near distance, and envision the salty waves bumping against my legs, my toes curling in the wet sand. The play field across the street from my childhood home is green and open to my left and I imagine rolling down the hills with my sisters. Then I glimpse it and exhale the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. Nestled on a quiet street; once green, now yellow. Home.
Traveling from our current home in Iowa to our childhood homes in Washington this past week, Tim and I realized the complexity of the term “home.” The kids knew we would be staying with Grandma this summer for Dad’s internship. While on the last leg of our road trip, Tim told Ella, “We’re almost home.” She replied, “We’re going to Jacksonville?”
Ella is nearly seven and we moved to our Illinois home when she was one. The house on a quiet street with its large backyard and pink and green bedroom is the first home Ella remembers. She took her first steps there, welcomed her baby brothers home there, and walked to her first day of Kindergarten from there. We only moved last summer, so when Ella envisions home she sees a white house with black shutters, our kitchen with a red wall, and a drive past corn fields.
We still own our Illinois house, but with no plans to call it home again. Both my older kids miss it, but Kai’s early childhood memories will involve a townhome in Iowa, where every neighbor owns a bicycle and a dog and his backyard is a community lawn.
Sometimes I worry that my kids won’t have that constant, tangible place to call home. The townhome won’t be our last stop and multiple places will represent home. At its most basic and beautiful, though, home means a place where we feel loved, safe, secure, comfortable, and joyful. My feelings about my childhood home are my memories of mom, dad, and my sisters. When we can no longer return here, I’ll still feel that sense of home whenever I am with them.
I live five blocks from the house in which I grew up. My parents still live there. I love that my daughter gets to spend so much time in my childhood home.
I spent so much time at my grandparents house when I was a child – from living there for a few years while my mom went back to college, to having it be my after school hang out, to just spending tons of time there with my cousins and the rest of our extended family. Even thought it wasn’t “our” house, I still consider it my childhood “home”. But you are right, those “home” memories all revolve around the people I was there with more than the house itself.
We just bought one if the houses i lived in as a child. Its neat my oldest has my old room.
We just bought a house that i lived in as a child for a while. My oldest has my old room.
I can completely relate to your drive home. I feel exactly the same way when I get off the exit in St. Augustine or in my hometown of Ft. Lauderdale. There is a rush of energy and a feeling of security just going of the bridges to get to the area I called home for so many years.