October 22, 2015 by Amy

The after effects of a virtual visit

One of the writers I started following on Twitter a few months ago told us followers to check out our childhood homes on Zillow. I couldn’t remember the street number for my house, because it’s been so long since I even thought of the place we moved from the summer before my 7^th grade. I had to use Google Earth to get to the road, and then click-navigate along before finding my house. I didn’t recognize most of the surrounding properties, partly because they’ve all changed so much and partly because I didn’t pay attention to houses that didn’t house my friends, but I finally saw my best friend’s house that was across the street and three or four up from ours. Ricky’s house sat on top of the hill, where the road up t-boned into our street. I still remember the steep gravel drive, and how it would develop deep ruts when it rained, and how it felt like we were going off-roading in my mother’s little Chevy Cavalier when all we were doing was climbing that drive to go home.

I clicked around and eventually got to my house. It looks so much smaller than I remember, and it has a faded red door now. A lot more landscaping in the front. My clubhouse is missing from the back yard, but I knew that was taken out years ago. Daddy’s deck still stands, though, spanning the length of the back of the house. The more I looked at the Google Earth image of my former home, the smaller and smaller it seemed. I ran through the layout in my mind…split level with two bedrooms up and one down. Full bath up, half bath down. Kitchen that opened to the eating area, but walled off from the family room, where there was a fireplace. I remembered Christmases there, and Easters. And that I had to take showers upstairs because my bathroom downstairs was a half bath, and the hilarity that ensued when my parents tried to bathe the cat in that shower. I remembered my baby sister scooting around in her walker, and how she’d inevitably scoot herself under the kitchen table and fall asleep. I remembered the 80s kitchen table chairs, padded monstrosities in brown, on casters. The mar on the kitchen table from Daddy’s cigarette, smoothed over and colored with a marker to make it less noticeable (unsuccessfully). The wallpaper in the kitchen, full of harvest colors and, if memory serves, silver accents. My mother standing at the stove cooking dinner, balancing on her left foot with the right resting on top of the left. Sometimes I find myself standing the same way when I cook.

I remember one perfect night. It was cold, and we were all at home, warm and comfortable. I had Girl Scouts after school that day, which automatically made it special. Daddy had built a fire in the fireplace, and I could hear the crackle as I sat at the kitchen table doing my homework. Mom cooked something that smelled incredible, because the woman could bring it in the kitchen, and she cooked old-school where dinner was amazing while making the top-ten list of cardiologists’ banned meals. Daddy was at the table with me, reading the paper and working on a crossword puzzle and helping me with my homework. Beanie was in her high chair, waiting for dinner. And I thought, “This is it. This is perfect. My family, right here, right now. We are warm and dry, we are together and happy, and we are about to be fed. No one is fighting.” It was an incredible feeling of warm contentment, which was sometimes rare in my childhood. I knew, at 10, that this was the way it should be, all the time, every night.

All this played through my head as I looked at the house on Westbourne. The good memories, and the bad. The comfort and the fear. The consistency and the unknown. All right there at my desk. I didn’t realize the power behind it, or else I wouldn’t have looked it up online over my lunch break. Instead, I sat there, gobsmacked and teary-eyed at work in the middle of the day.

In attempt to gain some distance, I plugged our old address into Zillow, as the tweet had originally instructed. The Westbourne house hasn’t sold in over 10 years, so there are no photos of the inside. There were, however, some basic stats about the house. Most I knew from memory (beds and baths, built in the mid-70s), and I learned that my old home is no longer within the boundaries of my old elementary school, but one fact really threw me. The house is 816 square feet. Now that I’ve been adulting for quite some time and have owned three homes and lived in four, I have a much better idea of what square footage feels like. And I know that 816 square feet is small for a family of four.

I fully recognize that I am a privileged, snobby, spoiled white girl writing about this. Yes, I am fully aware that an 816-square-foot house would be a godsend to many, many families. Yes, I know that I was lucky to have that home when I did. And yes, I know that I am a privileged, snobby, spoiled white girl. Might as well own it.

I’m not saying it’s bad that it’s 816 square feet. I’m saying that in my mind’s eye, that place is more like 1,800 square feet. A whole thousand square feet bigger than what it really is. How does that happen? It’s like going into a parent/teacher conference as a parent and being forced to sit in the tiny kindergarten chairs and thinking, “These were bigger when I was a kid.” Only in this case, it’s a whole house.

I know that memory is faulty, that sometimes (or most times) we end up remembering the stories about events more than the events themselves. But with this new realization, looking at my memories now comes with a new filter. I’m now mentally adjusting the layout of the house, and the events that happened with that layout, down to a smaller scale. My memories, for lack of a better word, are shrinking.

This is the ultimate in irony, as I watch my mother’s memories and abilities shrink from Alzheimer’s. If I was 10 years old in the memory I described above, the one of the perfect night, that would have made my mother 30. Twelve years younger than I am now. She was young and vibrant and beautiful and devious and deceptive. She drove fast and drank hard, often at the same time. And none of us knew, on that perfect night or after, what lay ahead.

There’s power in the past, and while it can and should be harnessed (after all, we who do not learn from our past are doomed to repeat it), we must also be careful to not let it overwhelm where are now. The 816 has been stuck in my head since yesterday, rolling around, popping up when I’m not expecting it. It’s bringing a lot of baggage for 816 square feet. I don’t live there any more, and I’m not 10 any more, and in fact, my own daughter is now 10. I know that instead of making my mother’s mistakes, I am committing sins of my own, just in a much larger house. On our own perfect nights, where the fire is glowing in the fireplace and my daughter is doing her homework and I know she had a great day because we had our Girl Scout meeting and her father is sitting in the kitchen working on his laptop and I am making a dinner I know my family will enjoy, I realize that I still don’t know what the future holds. I am coming to terms with that, because I am here now, and I am writing it all down, and because M and I are giving our daughter the firm, unshakeable foundation I never had, and that’s got to be worth something.