How do you say goodbye to your childhood home? It’s a question I keep asking myself as I sit in my new bedroom, knowing that strangers are currently touring hallways not too
far away, hallways that echo with twenty years of my family’s footsteps. Other than at college, my life had always revolved around in that house in central New Jersey.
My mother and I spent a lot of time preparing our old house for sale. I struggled with spending so much time there—not because I had to do work, but because I had to see my home as a house, as a marketable commodity. I filled my time filled with menial tasks; I kept wondering who would live there next. There are so many echoes of my family in that space, invisible to everyone new who tours through it.
Will these new people see the step up to my sister’s bedroom and know that she and I sat there every Christmas morning together, waiting for our parents to wake up? Or the marks on her floor where her bed was, an outline of where we used to fall asleep together while watching Great British Bake Off?
My own bedroom had a nook in it where I kept my desk. I’ve spent countless hours there, doing homework, writing, drawing, chatting on calls with friends… will the next owners feel my love for that space resonant in the walls? Will they feel the kindness of the many times my mother brought me dinner in that very spot when I had too much homework to go downstairs?
And before that place was my bedroom, it was my brother’s bedroom. I would sit with him when the nook contained his desk, and laugh at the same things, and watch him play video games.
My favorite room in the old house was the fireplace room. It had a soft, L-shaped couch that was perhaps a bit big for the paneled walls. There was almost always somebody sitting there, reading or on their phone or watching TV. I’ve fallen asleep in that room while leaning on my dad’s shoulder and sat with my mom for hours while we discussed what was on our minds that day.
And the backyard! My father built a treehouse for my siblings and me when we were children, with a trap door and a pulley system that could bring up snacks and send down messages. That tree has since died, and the treehouse came down with it years ago, but I can still see it standing there when I look outside and close my eyes. The zipline my father made for us still stands, though. I wonder, will new children use it, feel the exhilaration and the rush of wind through their hair? Or will somebody take it down, never having known that it made us feel like we could fly?
How can the place that I felt the safest for my entire life suddenly become foreign land to me?
All of the memories contained within that nineteenth-century farmhouse move with us. I don’t have the desk nook or the step into my sister’s room, but I have my brother and my sister now and always. Yet it still hurts when I think about how we used to thunder down those stairs when my dad made waffles in the morning, his three kids clumsy with youth and excited for bacon.
I could navigate that busy kitchen with my eyes shut and my hands tied. In this new house, I still don’t know where half the light switches are. Yet, our routine is the same. We all meander into the kitchen to get coffee when we wake up. Depending on the time of morning, sometimes I find my mom, still in pajamas, or my brother cooking a fun breakfast recipe. When I go back upstairs, I see my sister sitting at her desk. My dad is usually already in the room that is his office. My people are here, with me.
A piece of me will always live within our old house, where I learned how much love my family shares. What a beautiful thing, contained in the walls of our old house: the love we all had for each other. It echoes there, in a warm and welcome space that was once ours.
At our new house, there are boxes everywhere, and laughter and stress, joy and exhaustion. More importantly, there are the people whom I love the very most in the world. Maybe the new house isn’t home quite yet, but the people who live inside of it are where home will always be.
When a photographer came to take pictures of my old house, my mom and I were there to escort our one last guest inside. While setting up his tripod, he talked with my mother about how lovely our house was. She smiled, a touch of sadness in her eyes, and said, “It was a good house to raise a family in.”
At the core of that wrenching feeling of leaving our house behind, and the joy and fear of this shared new beginning, that is what matters most. In that house, we made a home. We all grew up together, and I can imagine nothing more beautiful than that.