Twenty years old, trying to navigate through the twists and turns of becoming an adult. Wandering aimlessly, or so it seems, through the world. No matter where you go, no matter how lost, broken, beaten, bruised, terrified or just flat out alone you feel there's always one constant calling your name: Home.
Right before my little sister was born, I turned two and my older sister turned four we moved into the home my parents had built. The second story and the basement were still unfinished so we lived, all five of us, amongst one bedroom, a kitchen and a living room for months. While there was still no carpet in one of the two second floor bedrooms my older sister and I used the plywood floor as our drawing board. There are pictures and fragments of words hidden like our own little secrets beneath the carpet.
The second floor came together within a year and my mother put pink carpet in the room we would all eventually share. She then painted the walls in a very intricate, pink pattern using nothing but a sponge. On top of that she painted white fence posts for headboards and pink, purple and yellow flowers floating around. In my high school years this was all painted over and hidden away like another little secret we'll always get to keep.
Next, the garage and sunroom were added on. They had just started digging and formed a hole that seemed huge to me in my six year old world. They also dug out what looked like a slide and steps off to the side. The three of us ran, rolled, tumbled and slid down into that hole, climbed out and ran around to do it all over again. It was eventually filled in and as the garage and sun room came to life there was another little secret we got to hold onto.
After the garage was finished it was a few years before the basement was started on. In that time we utilized the basement as a magical play land. We would roller skate around the concrete floor, play kickball (we ended up knocking out a lightbulb so dad put the kabosh on that right away), CSI, school and doctor all while navigating through the maze of boxes filled with things that still had no home. Near the end of my grade school years walls went up, rooms were formed and we were left with just one more secret of how things used to be.
The last of the additions was the pool in my seventh grade year. They dug a hole and left a mountain of dirt sitting in the yard for days on end which was fine with us, it might as well have been a toy that they left for us. We climbed and slipped and climbed again, yelped with joy when we hit the top of the pile, ran down and did it all over again. But soon our mountain was removed, the hole was filled in and though the pool brought us an abundant number of incredibly fun times with friends and family we still had another secret to hold onto.
All of these memories and secrets formed a little cocoon of safety and love for us to create all of our other memories. Like when my older sister cut my hair behind the chair in the living room, and when my parents sat us down in the living room to ask us if it was okay for them to buy a restaurant, and how we would play cards with our grandmas in the kitchen and Grandma Springsteen would always cheat so we could win and Grandma Schmidt would always cheat so she could win, and the day my little sister broke her arm I pushed her over a chair and she hit her head on the wall of the closet in our pink bedroom, and where we buried my favorite dog, Alice, and one of my many favorite cats, Maggie, and where I cried to my dad in the doorway of my bedroom the day I didn't get into the college my older sister was going to, and all the times we all fought as hard as we could and ended up friends again because we always loved each other harder.
Then after all of this when I'm twenty years old, on an unseasonably warm Thursday morning in January my dad tells me they bought a house. I knew they were looking but they had been looking for two years so I never thought it would actually happen. That we would get to this point of handing over the home we built together to someone else, someone of unknown origin and intention. We have to hand over a house where my sisters and I felt every emotion we've ever felt in our entire lives. After we hand over everything but our secrets, we move into a house that someone has lived in before. A house full of secrets that we are completely unaware of. A house that feels like a blank slate but actually has this invisible sort of graffiti running rampant on the walls and the ceilings and the floors and everywhere in between. We'll place our own invisible graffiti secrets over what we can't see and then one day hand it off again. In this house we'll grow in more ways than we can imagine, fall into and out of many things, cry for things lost and things left, scream for what we believe to be right, laugh to the point of tears, jump with joy and most of all love each other so hard that we couldn't imagine creating our new little secrets anywhere else with anyone else.
