Dad Sold the House

November 2006

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Dad sold the house sometime in November. We’d spent the months before cleaning it up, fixing things, getting it ready for someone else’s life. I don’t remember the exact day. I don’t think I wanted to.

I wasn’t sad at the moment. I knew that was suspicious — that the sadness was there, just on a delay, and that it would find me later in ways I wouldn’t predict. A song. A smell. Driving past the exit on 41 and not turning.

That house was the place I had a real sense of home about. Not just a place I’d lived — I’d lived in apartments, dorms, spare rooms — but the place that I’d use if someone asked me to picture the word. The kitchen where Mom cooked. The yard where the dogs ran. The barn, the fields, the particular way the light came through the east windows in the morning. It was the physical proof that my childhood had happened.

Even after Mom died, even after everything changed, the building itself held. I could go there. I could stand in the rooms and feel the residue of who we’d been. The walls remembered even when the people didn’t.

Now someone else would paint those walls. Someone else’s kids would run through that yard. The house would keep going — houses do — but it would stop being mine. The container would survive. The contents were already gone.

I knew from that point on, my relationship with home would be different. Not homesick, exactly. More like — the map I carried inside me would always have a place on it that I couldn’t visit anymore. A locked room in my own memory. I could describe every inch of it, but I could never again walk through the door and have it be real under my feet.

This is what it means to lose a place. Not that it disappears. That it keeps existing without you in it.