The older I get, the more my nostalgia for my childhood home increases. I feel very grateful and lucky to have a place that is such a constant in my life.
On the corner of an average block in an average midwestern town sits a redbrick house. When I was a teenager I would have called it a small redbrick house, but now after living in New York City for twelve years, it doesn’t seem so bad. There’s a bright kitchen with a window over the sink and an informal dining room and a comfy living room. In the back, there’s a screened-in porch and two huge oak trees. (I worry about those oak trees—how long before they are struck by lightning or felled by some invasive bug species?) There used to be a playhouse on stilts with a ladder to get up and a slide to get down, but my dad had to take it down for insurance reasons. The insurance company said we had to take out the woodstove in the basement, too, the one we lit on cold Saturday nights when we watched family movies and sat in bean-bags around the TV, covered in blankets and eating microwave popcorn. Now the TV is upstairs, in the living room, and there is cable—something we never had when we were kids—and everyone agrees it’s much better. But I still miss the woodstove.
In the small, not small, redbrick house there are two bedrooms on the main floor, and the upstairs is one big bedroom with a walk-in closet and a full bath. We shared that room for nine years, my two sisters and I, longer if you count the summers when I was home from college. We did homework there, shared clothes there, put on makeup there, while listening to Top 40 pop on the radio. And sometimes I would stay up late at night reading, and across the room my sisters would mumble in their sleep as if talking to each other.
Now I have a picture of the not-too-big, not-too-small house hanging on the wall of my New York apartment. It’s covered in snow and there are Christmas wreaths on the door and chimney. It truly is just right. I keep the picture there to remind me of where I came from and how I was loved. The brick house on the corner with the big oak trees that never really changes, where I am known, perhaps better than I know myself.