Coming home
Date Friday, March 29, 2024 - 07:46 AM PST
Topic Experiences


I've finally done it.
After 12 years of thinking the world ended at the meager city limits, 8 years devising means of escape, and finally achieving freedom...I couldn't wait to come back.

I grew up in a house on a strip of two-lane highway between one small town, and a practically non-existant town suffering the growing pains of industry. I remember mile on mile of towering pines on both sides of that long rural highway.... punctuated infrequently by a driveway, a home, or a grocery store. Not much else. Rural in every sense. Cable didn't reach our town. The Internet as an entity didn't exist. Computers were monotone, their games two dimensional and only for the rich, or those of nerd inclination. Nintendo wasn't around then. CD's were un-marketed technology. VCR's were a luxury. Their remote controls had a cord. Blonde jokes were funny.

Winters were spent on four wheelers and sleds. Summers were spent on home made slip and slides from tarps and whatever you could find to hold them down...usually something sharp and dangerous. And soap. Lots of soap. And memories...lots and lots of memories.

Our family built a new house in the woods across that highway where many loved pets met their end before horrified little eyes.

I spent the next 9 years in that new house in the woods. Every bit a home, new memories made, old pets buried. The old place of soap and cars and snow was surrendered for a price as an elderly care home. Then a home of drunks. Then a home of despair, joy, and dilapidation.

I sweltered under the atmosphere of small town politics, smaller small town minds, and a tommyknockers-esque fear of leaving; that outside was poison, and to leave was to never come back. I strained for freedom, I devised plans of escape, and I wallowed in my restraints. I saw the small and serene landscape as a prison...when the prison was in fact within me.

I made my break. With the end all and be all love of my heart, I broke free. I lived in a city. I lived in another. I began to feel as a claustrophobic would in a coffin. Other's voices through the walls...others bumps and sounds of life invading my own, as well as mine invading theirs, or being intently listened to. I could lie in bed and listen to a too smart and unguided 16-year-old shriek unwanted truths to an alcoholic and belligerent mother. I watched families raiding house wares from the dumpster below my window...one man's trash, another's treasure.

Again, as always, suffocating.

Then came an unexpected proposition...and an unexpected desire to do what I swore I would never would.
I came home, husband in tow. I came home to the house of soap and dogs and machines and snow and little muddy girl memories. The same outside carpeting in an unattractive tile print in the playroom...at least 20 years old now, so attractive and stylish then, now stained and tacky.

But I crawled on that carpet once. I played fort on that carpet. I cried on that carpet. I ran and played and was scared by my sisters with a ouija board on that carpet. I have pictures of a little girl that was once me painted blue with colored bath soap, tongue out, in that very same tub in the bathroom. I had 11 xmasses and birthdays in that same living room.

I thought it would just be a house...more room. More space. More quiet. Just a house.
It's not. It holds more memories for me than I gave these walls credit. It's a home...it's my home, it's my husband's home. It's our home.

For a girl who's spent a whole life feeling trapped...suffocated...without a place in the world, a sense of home is more than words can describe.
We're home. And it's beautiful.


This article comes from Shmeng
http://www.shmeng.com/

The URL for this story is:
http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=411