We Just Sold My Childhood Home
I guess it wasn’t technically my childhood home. I was brought up first in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I did love it there. Even if one day I forget everything else, I’m certain I’ll always remember the white and black tiled floors and the how the garden shed smelled like play-doh. Any real reminiscing about that house is usually to do with the trees. We had planted a small “orchard” where we grew citrus, some stone fruits, and apples (the apples never did well, everything else was imperfect but delicious) in addition to a massive eucalyptus, two olive trees out front, and what were “the only fruit-bearing feijoa trees in Maricopa County,” something my father was very proud of. My favorite of all of them, though, was a small palo verde that I would use a jump rope to climb, a tactic that occurred to me after I watched Indiana Jones for the first time. I’d pack a small knapsack with notebooks and pencils and sit in its branches for hours, scribbling out drawings and stories.
I’ve always been someone who has never quite known how to answer when someone asks me where I’m from, stumbling as I less-than-gracefully explain our coast-to-coast timeline. Born in Scottsdale two years after my older sister, found ourselves in Jersey for a year and a half, my brother’s birthplace, back to Scottsdale until I was ten, then Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a rural town in the Susquehanna Valley. We had no familial ties to any of these places. My mom is from New Orleans, my dad from Chicago; every move was for his job, as he was our breadwinner. Why a geneticist moved us around so much is still unclear to me.
In light of my father’s passing last June, my mom made the decision to leave Lewisburg and come home to Nola. I came, too- it felt correct and still does. Since I’m new to town, I’ve been asked where I’m from a lot over the past few months. I’ve found that without giving much conscious thought, if any, to my change in response, I’ve been less inclined since the move to awkwardly share my life story by way of location and have been giving just one place in response. Scottsdale was lovely, as was everywhere else, however nowhere is or ever will be Pennsylvania. Even more, no house is or ever will be our home on Dogwood Lane.
A few days ago, we sold it. We were at the movies when we found out, my mom, my brother and his girlfriend, and I. I usually hate when people text in the theater, but I couldn’t really be mad about this. My mother and I held hands and cried. My brother didn’t, but I felt something shift in him.
Where we’re “from” is a powerful identifier for us, hence the confusing babble I’ve long tended to offer in response to the question. We’re uniquely affected by each place we live in, a result of a number of factors. Our physical and social environments change, forcing us to adapt. Family dynamics often shift. We have to relearn our everyday, figure out who we’ll be in this new reality. It’s hard and weird, especially in adolescence. When you move a lot as a kid, identity often seems scattered among these different locals- we attach meaning and memories to the physical. Life is always happening and it’s doing so somewhere. We live both in places and of them, they give to us and we give back. It’s an energetic exchange.
While yes, every place has a separate, distinct influence on us and our stories, some are simply more impactful and therefore our bond to them is stronger, whether we accept or resent that connection. Such imbalance in influence is the result of a number of things, however the answer to where we’re from seems to be the place that we feel shaped us the most in our most formative years. Adolescence is a time of becoming, hence the phrase “coming of age.”
Lewisburg is where I came of age and the house has always felt representative of that. It’s where we and our friends worked away in the yard- every one of our houses has had a massive garden, where I spent the vast majority of my Saturdays from age four to eighteen- spending long summer days drinking lemonade and playing basketball in between bouts of weeding, or in the winter spending our Saturdays instead shoveling the driveway in hopes of hot chocolate and a few dollars. I pray I never forget what the world looked like from the big window in my room or warm nights catching fireflies, barefoot in the grass beside the cornfield. I’ve never seen stars brighter than there.
It’s also the house I used to try and sneak out of, the bedroom door I used to slam after fights with my parents, and the mirror I used to stare in for hours at a time, examining my stomach and thighs, unable to love myself in my reflection. I’d let boys who were hurting hurt me too, and I cried over them between the sheets of the same bed for a decade.
The walls of my room held me in mourning, in high school watching me grieve the death of my first love, and four years later looking on again as I grappled with my father’s unexpected loss.
Despite being a recovering nostalgia addict, I’ve never really had a tendency for homesickness, and while I wouldn’t call it homesickness per say, there’s now a sharp longing when leaving now that there wasn’t before. I’ll visit Lewisburg, of course. We have friends everywhere we’ve lived, but Pennsylvania is the place where we really chose to put roots down and build family and community from scratch. Even so, it’s not that I thought I would be there forever- I didn’t- but I always knew when I’d be back. More, I could go back, physically, to that house and the versions of myself and my family that live in its foundation. There’s a world there that my dad is still alive in, another where a ten year old me is running around in the grass, catching fireflies and letting them go a minute later because I always felt bad keeping them in jars. It’s a fascinatingly comforting thing, sleeping in your bed in your family home after you’ve been gone for a while.
I became a person in those acres. Just as bodies do, places and things keep score.
Meaning isn’t passive, which is to say that meaning doesn’t just happen; it isn’t intrinsic to a thing or moment or connection. There’s a formula, an active relationship between us and whatever’s holding meaning. Again, an energetic exchange. To use Comm major jargon, this exchange happens between the “signifier” and the “signified.” Signifiers are the object, or the vessel that meaning is applied to, while the signified is the meaning itself. We are facilitators of the signified.
My bed is gone, our house is sold, however I also understand these things, no matter how important, to be containers. That bed was just a bed in a warehouse somewhere until it was my bed; it wasn’t special until it became special to me, and I know I can access every feeling tucked into those walls from anywhere because without our part in the meaning-making process, nothing would have meaning at all. The house is only the signifier. It’s not leaving those we’ve lost or our community or everything we created, felt, and fought there to keep moving because to keep moving doesn’t mean to “move on,” and to move on doesn’t mean to forget.
My dad used to take long walks around the yard, silently examining the property. For years I laughed a bit when he did this, and at times even found it to be mildly narcissistic or self-indulgent. I understand now that it was none of these things; in fact, it was quite the opposite. This was his gratitude practice, an intentional appreciation for all that we’d built together, physically and emotionally, feeling the story we’d imprinted onto the land. Yes, he was admiring it all, but he was admiring all that it meant, not all that it was.
Selling our property brings a harsh permanence, but there’s an accompanying freedom. The house is a physical representation of a specific time in my family’s collective story as well as our individual narratives, however it’s also just that- a representation. We lived in the place, but everything the place means lives in us.
