This House

I write this as I sit in the emptiness of a house I lived in for 12 years of my life. I rest in the vacant living room that would hold our Christmas tree, our growing village, and the pile of gifts from my parents. This room held the sound of Christmas music and classic Claymation Christmas movies on ABC. It held the smell of Christmas cookies coming from the oven, the sound of cats running wild across the room, and the laughter from my sisters when the little tyrants would run into a wall. Now the sound of an empty, creaking house groans into existent. With no soul to be afraid of a ‘bad guy’ in the basement or the call for mom to tuck us in, does this place really make a noise? With no bed to go home to, no tradition to look forward to, and no getting together with old friends to yearn for, is this place home anymore?

It seems silly to find such attachment to a house. It’s a house, no more alive than the stalks of dead sunflowers eerily leaning in the garden outside. It has no more feeling than the dead ladybugs scattered around the carpet by the windowsills. And yet, why does my heart grow sad sitting alone here? Why do I find myself yearning for my junior year of high school when we had this house to go home to and was the last time we as a family were truly happy? If this is just a house as dead as an old lady bug or a frozen sunflower stalk, why do I miss it so much?

The memories this place holds can only be taken with us so far. Some memories go with us, but others stay here. The vibrant memory of 315 Jefferson Ct. at Christmas time can only be relived in this place. And no matter how hard we try to look on the bright side, no matter how much we may regret moving or pine to come back, nothing can fill the void of losing the plans you thought you would have. That may sound incredibly dramatic and ridiculous. But, until you have experienced leaving behind a place where you imagined so much of your future, you cannot understand. This house held dreams of my sisters and I bringing our first boyfriends home for the holidays, spending family dinners around the same table, cooking spaghetti sauce for church, gathering as a family for Christmas Eve, watching the different cousins visit and grow up, seeing our friends after months away at college, and even bringing kids of our own to this place, all have been flipped around, forgotten, and some lost.

I do not has for pity. There is pain found in losing and each circumstance and person brings different pain. Do I miss Hutchinson and the life I had here? Yes. Do I miss the memories this house held and could have held? Yes. Do I believe we can come back and pick up where we left off? No. Our life has moved on elsewhere. Our location has been discovered in a different part of the country and we cannot come back expecting everything to be the same. The last three years of my life have shown me life will never be the same as was it was my junior year of high school. Our family will not hold the same happiness it did then.

As I close the door and walk away from the home I have known nearly all my growing up, I will not look back. There is nothing I can do to relive the days or bring back the same feeling of safety and welcome as I found here. I can only wait for new forms of these to find themselves wherever the wind takes us. Whether it be house number four that we live in now, or number five, six, or seven, we will someday be happy again and someday have new memories to replace the old. I have to believe that.

God bless.

Carissa