They tell you to visit soon.
The moment you drive away you count how many times are acceptable to visit. Maybe once before you graduate. No, maybe a couple times. How many days are you able to stay? If you overstay do you become a permanent resident again? Or are you just temporary? The moment you picked out your room color defined the rest of your days. Your playroom changed to your study when you had more papers for homework than friends.
The spiral staircase always too narrow for laundry baskets, but perfect for the cat to swirl up and down between human legs. When you saw Princess Mia have almost an identical set in her old house before moving to Genovia, it became a conversation starter at school lunches. The fascination only lasted so long before they found you weird or too stupid to hang out with them.
Remember the forest sized blades in your backyard. Your father and mother's hobby of restoring weeds from dirt then laying out fresh mulch and picking cucumbers a summer past time while you read a book a day on a towel. The backyard grass a makeshift beach without the sunburn. Other times, you and your father are restoring a damaged motor for the other irony, a party boat. Your parents were never and will never be the party people. They are too shy. They curve themselves into the boat seats and just coast around the lake when the sun is just about to set.
You never learned to drive...a car. You can drive, park, fix, and restore this boat because you know it like the back of your hand. It became your happy place. This boat became where your ideas became stories. Where characters became passengers.
Your front "yard" was a lake whose name always causes others to tilt their head a little off killter. They wonder if you actually can swim it as if some lake monster will come ashore to drag us back to one of its island homes. Maybe the times you showed them this lake it was frozen.
A sheet of glass only glided over. Never a crack. The directions of the echoes always seemed to come from underneath your skate's blades and on the opposite end towards these islands. When you learned to ice skate, you remember your father teaching you that skating is a lot like life. You must balance, but also never let yourself forget that it is okay to fall as long as you get back up again.
Your childhood is stored in boxes seen with more dust than cardboard and memories within the walls that when you were little could talk and took you beyond the house to distant lands long forgotten by now. To forget about the memories would be awfully hard when you have dozens of mental files and blueprints to a home walking with you every day.
The biggest thing to remember is that it is just a house.
