Ten Years a Home

Celebrating a huge milestone in our house.

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On my phone, in Maps, I keep a guide called “Places I’ve Lived.”

With a tap of the screen, everywhere I’ve resided from Tennessee to the Atlantic Seaboard shows up in one single frame. It feels a bit like magic, these little red dots all together, in unity, for once.

My ten years in the 757.

In reality, they represent disjointed seasons and fragments of my life, people coming and going, near constantly. Much of the time, I was the “people.” My entire childhood I spent weekends, holidays, summers, and school years inhabiting different addresses, sometimes returning to an entirely new one I had to memorize. Change and upheaval were the norm.

One school year, I didn’t even bother unpacking the boxes in my bedroom.

I’d started collecting these places from my past, studying house and apartment listings I could find online, when I began EMDR therapy in 2018. By that point, Cliff and I had been living in our current home for five years: far and away my longest continued residence in one home, ever. After each therapy session, I was curious to see how accurately my brain was able to recall the details of the spaces in which the memories had taken place. It was almost scary, how spot-on they were.

This was a powerful practice, though, for me to view these images knowing I was healing, knowing I was becoming less stunted by the complexities of those years, knowing I was coming into an agency that I hadn’t, at that time, been afforded. I have lengths to go, even still, but when I follow the westward trajectory of these points on the map, I feel the sense of promise that brought me to the area I’ve now spent more than half my life living.

Ten years ago, today, we were handed the keys to a house that, while maybe not forever, is the home I’ve waited my whole life to know. It’s still wildly imperfect at times, rife with the chaos of mess and strife and more, but it’s one of the greatest blessings I’ve ever received, learning to dwell here. Learning to make home and keep it, even in ways I never anticipated.

Back when you could see Harris Teeter (now Kroger) from our front porch.

The decision to build this home was unexpected and swift, but the joy of it grew in those days we watched the contractors bring to life the plans we’d been handed for her design. We had no say on the outside, but the double bay windows, gabled roof, and front porch had walked right out of my love for Victorian-style houses (like Carl and Ellie’s and the Torkelsons’) and onto the page. The insides were relatively ours for the making, as were the years we’d spend making this house our home.

The day we were handed those keys, we had a one year-old child and another on the way. From the road outside our neighborhood, you could see clear across the lake I now walk laps around, to our house where it stood on the edge of the expanse between finished development and what is now a sprawling “town center.” Everything felt possible and new.

And yet, on closing day, I remember standing in our neighborhood grocery store, marveling that I could grab a bag of chips that had been my favorite since childhood. I’d never been able to find them in the eleven years I’d already lived in Tennessee.

In all her bare wood, framed glory. We can’t see her like this from that spot anymore.

Honey BBQ and “The Crab Chip” for life. And yes, I did take this photo that day.

It was the first of many moments this house would become the place I’d learn to come home to myself, reconciling what was to what is — healing both in real time and in the past, and beginning to make peace with parts I’d for so long buried. I had no idea what these ten years would hold, couldn’t have at all imagined what would bloom and grow here — in me, in our marriage, in our children.

It is no Eden, though. Terrible things have happened here, too. Hard things. Things we have, over time, learned could refine us if we let them. We have, and they did. They still do. Even when she herself, with her faulty appliances, loose hoses, and imperfections, has been the cause for our refining, this house has sheltered us. She herself keeps becoming something new, albeit a bit tired, far more unkempt than some of her peers, and marked in irrevocable ways. Sounds familiar.

I hadn’t intended to finish this piece here, ankle bandaged and propped, just like me, on a myriad of pillows in bed. But after a literal turn of events while working at a local coffee shop, I came hobbling home. It’s rare for me to be here mostly alone. Jasper sits outside soaking up the sun in his favorite worn spot in the grass that can’t make up its mind whether it wants to live or die. For a little while, I hear only the click of the keys under my fingers and the low hum of the ceiling fan above me. Naturally, just when it’s perfectly quiet, a blower starts up a few doors down.

I’m sad to have the day swept out from under me, but nothing reminds me of the true joys of this house more than when she also meets me in my pain. And what a beautiful job she’s done of it these last ten years.

She’s not so little, anymore.

Thank you for reading,