Where We Grew Up

They were the only ones to live there.  Single owner home, the Vaughans moved in when my dad was in elementary school.  

Home is not a place, I always told myself, having moved over a dozen times before I was in my mid-twenties.  Home can't be a place, because places change.  People move.  In, out.  We take home with us, wherever we go. 

So when it came time to move the Vaughans out of Severn Way, the pain was surprising.  

The word pain seems dramatic.  But it's the word I have.

In this home I learned how to make pasta, play Mario Kart, knead bread.  We performed countless plays to Elton John's Lion King soundtrack.  Dozens of holidays were spent with the kitchen steaming from boiling potatoes and beans you weren't allowed to stir.  I sat in bed with rollers in my hair.  We ate 3 Musketeer bars from the cabinet.  Were slipped $20 bills.  Sat on the back porch swing while she told us about herself - a bravery I wouldn't even recognize until I was an adult.  

Dad and I wrecked our bikes right outside the front doors in the cul-de-sac.  Marty took me down the street to drive for the first time in the Pathfinder.  We had movie nights in the basement with our friends.  I learned about dieting. I used a computer for the first time.

I used to dream I lived there all the time.  In the basement bedroom, which used to be my dad's.  What would it be like to live in Lexington, with that bedroom all to myself?  

Those same dozens of holidays, music was played.  On the piano, on the dulcimer.  Someone would start, probably dad, but it was not uncommon for a brother to join.  No one read sheet music there.  No one wrapped Christmas presents, the grandkids just received giant gift bags.  We had turkey on Thanksgiving, but steak at Christmas.  And regardless of the weather outside, dad and at least one of his brothers grilled for us.  The back sliding door fogging up from the heat inside and the cold outside.  We played botched versions of croquet in the back yard and grew those green beans and threw balls on to the roof.

When I was around 20, things started changing.  To this day, if someone were to ask me when I first started feeling like an adult, I would recount this phone call.  She had fallen.  They were headed to the hospital.  Could I go clean up the kitchen where she fell.  

I remember feeling trusted.  And getting to Severn Way, realizing Marty had beat me to the bulk of the clean up.  But still feeling as if suddenly I'd been folded in to the inner circle.  I could handle the not-so-perfect side of our family now.  I was sure.

We've spent the last fifteen years in a strange, imperfect space.  Less dinners together.  A divorce.  Infection. A rainy day, which caused my own mom to fall.  More babies.  A global pandemic.  The effects and impact of trauma and illness have taken what we once were and we are now close to unrecognizable.  

So this year when it became evident another move needed to take place, what came next felt inevitable and equally devastating.  He was supposed to be ok.  He would have been ok, I thought, if we hadn't created so much space.  My favorite person would still be my favorite person, if he hadn't put someone else first.  If I hadn't been afraid.  

But in the way he always had, he showed little to no attachment to his things.  And he waited patiently at the window for my other favorite person to take him to his new home.  Despite fifty years in one place.  Despite an entire lifetime in one house.  He's now settled in to simplicity.  Eating cinnamon rolls we bring him.  Having learned my lesson far sooner than I learned it.  

Still I tried to make it my own.  The home we all grew up in.  This felt like the right choice, the way to save the story.  Somehow, maybe, I could redeem it all. For my dad, especially.  And for myself.  

We cleared out literal tons from our home.  With every box, every load, every garbage bag, every prescription bottle, every Champion sweatshirt, every bread pan, I found myself easing closer to the lesson.  

~

Where we grew up will always hold some of my favorite and most formative memories.  

The gift of Severn Way will always be the reminder that where we are, the things we have are less important.  

The gift is I come from strong people.  From people who have tried their hardest, regardless of whether it has been enough.  People who are creative and intelligent and loving, in whatever way they can be.  

Later, the house on Severn would sell at a yard sale.  

Later, it was clear the lesson here was not the house, but the healing.  

Later, I'd walk into an empty house.  Leave a key on the counter.  And lock the door behind me.