A house is the box you keep home in. I thought about that as I rode the plane making my last trip home to California. I’m likely to be in California again multiple times in my life, but after this trip I can’t drive up to the door of the house I grew up in and expect to be let inside. My sister says the house doesn’t matter, what matters is bringing my parents to where we can help care for them. She is right. And she is wrong. I’ve been here for days already and expect to spend a week more. I’m packing and sorting and discarding. As the rooms become empty of objects, they become an easier canvas for me to remember what used to be. I stand in a room and see the shape of it. I remember what it looked like when I was thirty bringing children, when I was fifteen, when I was five. All the changes of paint and flooring and furniture. Standing in the space the memories are close enough to touch, to close my eyes and see.
We’re going to sell the house to people who don’t know the stories, who don’t remember what was. The house, the box of walls, will get new people and a new existence. I will have to try to remember without being surrounded by the walls that held the memory.
This house burned when I was 18. While I was navigating the fall of my freshman year of college, my parents had to live in a rental house while this one was stripped down to studs and rebuilt. When I came home to it shiny and fresh with all new fittings, I felt like I’d lost my childhood home. I mourned for it then. Only to discover that we re-inhabited and old memory made itself cozy again. Thirty more years of family in this space and that fire, which was so devastating at the time, now feels like a blip in the existence of my childhood home.
I contemplate that as I stand in the rooms with memories flicking through my mind like slideshows of bygone eras. Because the memory isn’t stored in the walls here. I carry it with me. I’ll just have to work harder to access it when I can’t stand in the place where it happened.