I was in my mid-20s when my parents decided to sell our family home. On the night before the sale was finalized, I slept there one last time, camping out on the floor of the living room. Memories flooded my mind then and still do all these years later every time I think of that place. Despite the decades between then and now, I can see it so clearly.
How many countless hours I stood in that kitchen, washing dishes and helping my mother cook. Each evening, we gathered around the kitchen counter or at the table listening to my father, who was the Matlock of attorneys, regale us about his courtroom antics. Conversation never lagged in our eat-in kitchen.
The built-in shelves surrounding the living room fireplace weren’t there in the beginning, but they seemed to belong so perfectly that it was hard to recall when that wall space was bare. Our house was a place of imagination and discovery because my parents loved to read. The chair by the fireplace next to the bookcase belonged to my father. How easily his visage returns, peering down into one of the books on history, art, or biography that lined those shelves.
The Christmas tree with its multi-colored lights and tinsel sat in front of the picture window with presents underneath. In my mind, I see the ghosts of our childhood selves rushing down the stairs across from that window every Christmas morning.
Thanks to the piano and our stereo console, the walls of that living room reverberated with the music of many eras: the standards of my parents, the early rock’n’roll of my older siblings, folk songs and ballads, hymns, harmonies, and classics.
My oldest sister’s dates, tall and handsome high school boys, sat in that living room as she came downstairs. One of them used to lift me up to the ceiling when I was three or four, and I squealed with delight. Susie was the prettiest girl at Rankin High School, and she radiated warmth. When she married, she moved next door, so that became my favorite place to visit.
My parents’ bedroom held visions of my mother getting ready for church, rummaging through her jewelry box, picking out a dress from the closet. I remembered the feeling of safety when I crawled into Daddy’s lap in his chair by the window. And there’s little me sifting through the top drawer of the dresser in search of the Luden’s cherry cough drops my daddy always kept there.
How many times my sister Susie washed my hair in the tub of the downstairs bathroom. She was a teenager when I was a toddler, but she doted on me, even enlisting me at age four to be the mascot for her graduating class and then the flower girl at her wedding.
We spent nights in front of the television in our den, sitting on a red plaid couch or on the floor. When I was very young, an episode of “The Adventures of Superman” upset me so much that my mother had to usher me out of the room. Much later, Herman Jr., the baby squirrel we saved, loved to bury nuts in that sofa and dart up the curtains just behind it.
I could go on at length about the memories tied to that house, that land, the old oaks, the forest, flowers, brook, all of it. I’ve lived in the home my husband and I built for over 30 years, but the house of my childhood is always “home” in my dreams.
No one else in my family may have understood my attachment to that place or the reason I wept so much when I had to say goodbye to it. But I always knew our memories lived in those walls and in the earth where we grew and played. This was the place where I was shaped, fashioned into the woman and the writer I would become. Those trees, that hillside behind the forest with the little stream at its base, breathed stories into my being. That house, the old chicken coop, the crumbling pigpen from years past where we kept a salt lick for the deer, the massive milky quartz that jutted out from the ground in the backyard, the two-story barn where we played and explored—these were a part of me and so hard to let go.
And I knew that our house would remember us. Every footfall, each moment of laughter and tears, every emotion we ever felt would remain. That place would forever hold an imprint of our former selves. We left behind countless trails of light where our souls touched each other in that home and on that land. The people we once were echo through those walls and along those pathways through the forest. It will ever be the place my psyche remembers as home.
copyright 2005 Lillian D. Henderson
