Homeward Bound

I have a memory that connects things. Driving past giant peeling Eucalyptus in the Berkeley Hills I can hear a high school boyfriend whisper Je Taime. Flipping through old photos, coming across one of my childhood bedroom I remember my mother telling me what it was like to get your period, confiding in me that while most women cringe at the thought, she enjoyed it because it reminded her she was a woman, that she could have children. I tie places with people and people with moments and moments with feelings that I want to hold on to. This, I have recently realized, is why I have a preoccupation with structures.

Four walls, a foundation and a roof create our lives in ways I haven’t completely unwound. My grandmother’s house holds the comfort and love of my childhood. It holds my fathers work, a second story created from his imagination. That house being sold gives me an ache in my chest. Recently I vowed to have it back. Save our pennies and one day I will march up to the front door and say, “My grandmother watched this house being built, fell I love with it, bore my mother in it. My father built the second story 50 years later. He no longer builds, my grandmother is gone, and I would like to buy our house back from you.”

It occurred to me after a week of planning that the people who have purchased this house may be settled. They may have babies they plan to raise there. They may love that house like I do and they might calmly smile at me and tell me that they have great plans to live and die in that house.

And now with the possibility of selling my own house, I begin to confront the notion of homes holding memories, love, moments. My own house has been lived in by us for less than seven years. But I was pregnant twice in this house, my babies were conceived here. I have shared this house with the only man I have ever loved and we have fought and tangled and untangled in this house. We have laughed and thrown up and bathed and hiccuped and lounged naked in this house. I smoked on the front porch, Jaya hand-tiled the kitchen, my closest friend lived here with me the first several years. We planted gardens, hung laundry on lines even though we have a dryer. We picked apples and raised hens that gave us smoke-blue eggs every day for years. I laid the slate in the front patio by hand 8 months pregnant.

I nursed and rocked and cried my babies to sleep here. They said their first words here, walked their first steps. They know no other concept of home except our Bluehaven. I have a dog buried here, four cats, chickens, rabbits and two ducks in our garden. My life has evolved in this home into something that I love so fiercely, I’m afraid it will change if I leave. I am afraid that if I leave here it will be different and I will pine for what my life is now. It’s life – it’s messy and hard and sometimes unbearably sad, but it is also perfect in the scheme of things. I’m afraid that the moments, the feeling I have had in this house will somehow fade if I let it go, let someone else love and live inside its walls.

I am beginning to toy with the idea that I can take it with me. Not in the big picture sort of way, I’m too philosophical for that. But in the little life kind of way. I’m beginning to wrap my mind around the fact that it is all in my head. That when it comes down to it all I need are these three men to make any four walls what I love. That every moment I’m afraid of losing I have preserved in other ways, photos, videos, writing. And the biggest thing is that I am beginning to digest the fact that it all will go away. That no matter how hard I try to remember, no matter how long I live in this house, that my children will grow up and life will change and if all else fails my memory will fade and all of this will be in the past, gone. I know it sounds depressing, but it is life. I worry about these tiny things, like selling a house and in 50 years all I will remember is how much I loved my family.