Home Sweet Home

You probably have a particular emotional attachment to a certain dwelling from your past. Perhaps it’s your first apartment, replete with parental castoffs and cobbled-together bookshelves stacked with a portable black-and-white TV, stereo components and Crosby, Stills and Nash albums. Maybe it’s the house you bought while in the first bloom of love as a newlywed, furnished in Early Salvation Army. Or the home you rehabbed by the sweat of your brow, gutting and plastering and plumbing and sanding and ruing that you pigheadedly married for love instead of money.

Me though, I’ve never become attached to those physical spaces in which I’ve lived. In our first 17 years of marriage, Curt and I changed residences 10 times. Don’t get me wrong, I loved living in some of those places, but it wasn’t the rooms where we lay our heads at night that have me waxing nostalgic. No, the best places have some sort of magical aura having nothing to do with the size of the closets or the number of bathrooms.

Such was my state of mind as we drove into my old neighborhood in Ankeny, Iowa, last weekend. Every time we’ve been back over the years I’ve wanted to drive by the house my parents built and which we moved into when I was in sixth grade, my little sister Pam in second, and my brother Jay a sophomore in high school. How I loved that house! The closet-inside-a-closet in which I held secret club meetings. The laundry chute I could stick my head inside and listen to my idiot sister’s friends act like dorks downstairs. The pool and pingpong tables in the large rec room, perfect for hosting boisterous slumber parties. The back stairway built so my mom would have easy access to the clothesline out back, but for a teenager the perfect accomplice for sneaking out at night.

So many times I’d wondered how it looked inside since my parents sold it around 1975. I’ve even seen this house in my dreams. Well, this time we didn’t just wistfully drive by. This time, there were people in the driveway. “Just pull in so I can say hello,” I told Curt.

And, you guessed it, they invited us in for a tour. The young family has lived there for 10 years, and were eager to tell me why they loved the house, and were equally as eager to hear how I and my family had loved it. Surprisingly, not a lot had changed. All the important stuff was still there: the closet, the laundry chute, the back stairs; I could feel my sister practicing her clarinet as I turned up the bass on the console stereo to drown her out. I could see my mom’s little dog barking at Borgy the garbageman at the picture window. I could hear my elderly Dutch grandma rounding the corner from the hallway, unabashedly passing gas, long and loud, as my friend Sue and I tried to keep our faces straight while burying our noses in Sears catalogs.

But the best part? The homeowner herded me into the bathroom and pulled out the vanity drawer next to the toilet. “Maybe you can clear up a mystery for us,” she said. “We’ve always wondered who Pam is.”

“Pam stinks. B.W.” Carved for posterity into the side of the drawer. That house, by God, I do love still.