To my childhood home,
You and I have been through quite a lot together. Your floors provided me the opportunity and courage to take my first steps. Your walls hold pictures of memories I will never forget. Your door hinges have the heights of every age until I stopped growing. Your driveway is where I learned both to ride a bike and how to do a three point turn. It wouldn’t be fair to call you a house because as they say, home is where the heart is. Over the years, you have been a place I have been able to find great comfort in, to bond with family members and friends. And most of all, you have been the place of some of my best memories.
Thank you for being a place where I have always felt incredible love; there is nothing sweeter than coming home after a long day and being surrounded by all the people you love the most. Thank you for being the place of many family dinners where we shared the highs and lows of our days, and shared laughs as we broke bread together.
Thank you for being the place where I cried over my math homework when I was 12, and the place where I sprinted to the mailbox with excitement as I received my first college acceptance letter. Thank you for holding my biggest accomplishments up on your walls, and letting me destroy your walls with crayons when I was three.
Thank you for allowing me a place to learn. I’ll never forget when dad taught me how to swing a bat, when he continued to tell me to point my feet at our neighbor’s house. Or the time I practiced my cartwheels in the front yard until I stuck the landing just right. How about when I fell off my bike 16 times until I learned to balance? Or the time I sang the same rhymes over and over just to learn to tie my shoes. And the unlimited talks around the kitchen island where my parents taught me perspective and gave me words of wisdom.
Thank you for providing a place for my friends and me to always come to. Thank you for being a place that I could allow my imagination to run wild, even when it meant I broke mom’s favorite lamp. Thank you for the stairs that I ran down every Christmas to see if Santa had come. Thank you for being a place I could express myself, from tone-deaf singing using a hairbrush as a microphone to decorating my room in any way of my own choosing.
Most of all, thank you for always being the place I will call home. I wouldn’t quite be the person I am today without you. This was a space that allowed me to make bonds that have taught me more than I could have ever imagined. It is a place where I got to explore my potential. It is a place in which I learned many life lessons. In addition to those things, it is also a place that has countless amounts of laughs and smiles with the people I adore the most.
Walking out of my childhood bedroom as I left for college, shutting the door on a countless number of memories throughout the years, was enough to make me weepy. Knowing I would be back, but not for some time, and knowing when I returned that it wouldn’t quite be the same, I felt nothing but gratitude for that 12 by 14 room that had molded me into the person I am today.
Someday, you may be someone else’s home, and you may also be the holder of their memories too. I hope that you can be a place where they make memories to last a lifetime also, a place where they can find comfort, security and unconditional love in. As life goes on and people move, nothing is forever except for the feeling your childhood home will bring you. For all that you have given me, and more, I am forever thankful.
Love,
Your resident
