Home is where the drive-thru cigarettes are. Revisited.

There is a FOR SALE sign in the only yard I’ve ever known. Eeek! Since I’m staring at it through the window of my old room, I thought I would re-post this essay from December:

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 I’ve just bought a ticket for my last trip home. Ever.

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.

[Note: Nobody’s really interested in buying our house. Maybe it’s because they don’t like it. Maybe it’s because a guy murdered his mom and a prostitute on my street not long ago. Either way, the agony of leaving this house is dragging on. So… if you’re in the market for a cute house in a town with drive-thru cigarettes, please do not hesitate to contact me. I’ll throw in a Mickey Mouse rotary dial phone.]