I went home this weekend. Home, home. As in, hometown home. I’ve been officially away for six years now, although I make it back two or three times per year to visit family. Each time I’m back, I spend at least half an hour driving aimlessly, checking to see what’s changed and what hasn’t. There’s really no feeling like that, as far as I’ve found. It’s a little like being struck with a light case of temporary amnesia: You see all the pieces of the puzzle and certain things stand out as meaningful, but minor details have been changed just enough that you wonder whether it’s always been this way and your memory is mistaken, or if it’s been changed.

I have an unofficial checklist of areas I pay special attention to: friends’ houses, my high school, the park down the street from the house where I spent my entire childhood. For the most part, it all tends to look familiar but not unchanged. There’s a Walgreen’s where the fire department used to stand. The First National Bank is now City Hall. They’ve leveled my best friend’s home and put up a strip mall. OK, that one didn’t actually happen, but so much as a color change can feel that way.

Up until my latest visit, my own neighborhood had remained mostly untouched. Only a handful of families remain from the time I lived there, but the houses had been left almost exactly as I remembered them. This time, though, my own house was in the midst of a major overhaul, and I could hardly stand to look.

The tree in the front yard is gone. The one I helped plant when I was about 6 years old. My dad and uncles spent an entire weekend removing a dead sycamore before we planted this new maple in the same spot. There are pictures of me in a lime green Nike windbreaker, standing up to my neck in the hole where the sycamore had once lived. And now the new residents have taken out the tree I remember putting in. That’s just the beginning.

The cement driveway my grandpa put down in the mid-90s was freshly mutilated, most of it still sitting in a trailer on the street. As I drove through the neighborhood, I thought about putting the car in park, grabbing a chunk of it, and driving off like nothing had happened.

With the driveway went the basketball goal, the one that was there when my family moved in and outdated before I was even able to dribble a ball. It was tall and white, with a wooden backboard and a rim set permanently at 10 feet. The goal was inflexible, uncool and probably the reason I suck at basketball. What kid can learn to properly shoot hoops on a rim of that height? Still, I hated to see it gone.

The last thing I noticed before I had to drive away was the front door. It stood wide open, and I could see the family inside working away at what looked like a renovation. It was the family who bought the house when we moved out, and I’m sure they’ve changed more than I’d care to imagine in the past six years. But there was something about this particular time, the fact that I could actually see into their home, that really shook me. In just a couple of years, it will have been a decade since my family moved out and they will have never known or cared what the house looks like in my memory. That’s an awful feeling. I drove off wishing I had taken more pictures before we left, so I could verify that the house I remember and the house I love was the way I remember it to have been. Bitter? I guess. Homesick? Oh yeah.

Leave a Reply