When I was eleven years old, I went through one of the most life changing moments of my childhood. I was forced to grow up fairly quickly, something that no kid should experience at that age. I was stuck in the middle of a tornado of family drama. My parents had sold our two-family home to my uncle because we were in financial difficulty. I was fine with this change because there was no change at all; we were still going to live in the house, we just didn’t own it. But since the house now belonged to my uncle, he could have whomever he wanted to move in with him.
His girlfriend, of the time, wasn’t the ideal person to live with. She was conniving, sneaky, and manipulative; I didn’t trust her. Once she moved in, she and her daughter unpacked all of their things and immediately started drama. Her daughter had played my uncle into thinking my cousin, my sister, and I had pushed her down a flight of stairs connecting both parts of the house. She winced while holding her arm and fake cried herself into a tizzy and, needless to say, it didn’t end well for us.
This was the first glimpse of what was yet to come. I was eight at that time, and over the next three years, it only got worse. There was stealing, lying and broken promises; when I turned eleven, stuff hit the fan. His girlfriend had taken advantage of our home while we were away. I won’t get into the details of it, but let us just say important things were not in their place when we returned.
My mother was not amused, and she seemed to have noticed things were missing right away. She called the police, and when my uncle's girlfriend was found guilty, my mother took pity and didn’t have her arrested. This stirred the pot, and in the grand scheme of things, my uncle didn’t care for the pity, and we were asked to find a new home as soon as possible.
This put a dagger through our family and especially through my sister, my cousin and me because we were not allowed to see each other. What hurt equally as bad is that we lost the first house that felt like home. The big bedroom my sister and I shared would no longer be ours. The backyard pool and friends we made in the neighborhood would no longer be there, and the memories we made would live in our hearts, but new ones would seize to exist.
In my lifetime, I have moved six times, and I am in the process of moving a seventh. All in the same town. In the same half-mile radius. God knows why we never expanded. We had six, going on seven different neighborhoods, and none were remotely close to this. The people in our new neighborhoods were not as friendly, the streets weren’t the same to play on, there was no pool to make summer memories in with my childhood friends, no one my age to trick-or-treat with, and there was no place to put a big, red Santa’s sleigh in the winter.
What makes a house a home is not the color of the room, the size of the yard, or anything about the physical house itself. What makes a house a real home is the connections and memories you make with neighbors. Memories of running into each other so many times you can’t play for a week, or watching your goofy neighbor rip his pants every time he hopped the fence to get his soccer ball, or all the times you played basketball with your cousin, uncle, and sister no matter how bad you were, or even playing cricket with your other neighbors (even though you had no idea what was happening but when your friend got hit with the ball and cried you knew you shouldn’t be playing).
What makes a home is the people you are surrounded by and the love you all share. It’s moments that make you seem like a family that makes that big, old, gray house big enough for two families, feel like a home and not just a house. I can say that, ever since I left that neighborhood, no house has ever felt like a home to me. My home will forever be 28 Grimes Road.
