Tag Archives: childhood home

At Home With My Mom

Posted on by under Guest, Reclaiming Place

I spent a few days back home recently. At my mom’s house in a suburb outside of Houston. I’ve actually never lived there. Not in that house, not on that street or in that town.

DSCN6768.JPGI’ve never scaled those walls in the hallway. The back bedroom doesn’t have two different styles of wallpaper. The newer one from my high school years; a strip of the older wallpaper, from before the basement fire, in the closet still. The cement on the back porch doesn’t have my younger handprint engraved in it. The familiar items in the kitchen aren’t all in their right spot exactly. I mean, I can still find the sugar and flour in their Tupperware canisters to the right of the stove. The notebook, pens and scissors still have their exact spot so you can always find one when needed. But the cereal is now kept in the pantry closet, not in the cabinet above the dishwasher.

It’s a little unsettling seeing the stuff from my childhood in another setting.

Even though I’ve only frequented the suburbs of Houston in my adult years, I do have my list of favorite places to eat when I visit. Of course, it’s not the Hy-Vee grocery on the edge of my hometown where there’s a tenderloin sandwich special on Tuesdays. Or the Chinese buffet that makes the best American-style chicken strips because my friend’s dad, who owns the restaurant building, taught the owners how. Or the new donut shop that opened recently. I frequent all of these when we go back to spend time with extended family still there.

We have our list though. My favorites in her new town don’t hold the childhood memories that I have of that small town in rural Missouri. But they’re new memories I’m making with my mom.

We were sitting in her living room one afternoon and I mentioned how at home I felt in that moment. She reacted with great surprise. In a shaky voice, she said, “Really? Because it always makes me feel bad that we can’t meet up at the old home place. I never imagined leaving there.” My mom grew up in a town so small it didn’t even have one stoplight. She married young and knew no greater joy than being a wife and raising a family. In that one statement, she expressed her ongoing incredulity at where life had taken her.

When Dad died suddenly in 2006, everything changed. Actually, things had been changing years before that. Divorce always changes things. But when Dad passed away and we uncovered the debt he’d been incurring, it became clear pretty quickly that the family property outside of my hometown would need to be sold. Mom already lived in town by then but I think we’d all thought the property would ultimately be our gathering place. Even though my brother and I lived in other states. Even though my mom had left behind her lifelong dreams some time ago along with the house they had built together.

I think a part of her never forgave herself for walking away from it all. She really had no choice. We understood that. But the heart always wonders.

“Mom,” I said. “Since the divorce you’ve lived in a few different places. They’ve all felt like home to me because you’re there. When I visit, my heart knows I’m going to see my mom.”

There will always be a part of me that wishes my mom still lived in the little ranch house on Route 4. I’d enjoy watching my daughter set up a picnic under one of the trees in the front yard. We planted them in the 70‘ so they’re probably mature by now. It would give me endless pleasure to set out walking on the dirt road of my childhood, three generations across. We’d take a walk to the old Methodist church, although its doors are closed for good now. On the way back, maybe we’d swing by the cemetery and have a short visit with dad. But it wasn’t meant to be.

Life takes us so many places. I’ve learned this along the way. Wherever it takes mom, my heart will find a home there.

11923208_10206213051718939_6918748677159137139_n-3My name is Traci. I live in southwest Michigan, somewhere in a triangular section connecting Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids with all things Lake Michigan. My husband and I parent one daughter. We have dogs, cats, pigs and chickens. Their number is always changing, as farm animal counts tend to do. I enjoy watching sports, reading, cooking and all things Bible study. I am a writer.  When I first started blogging, I wondered about what unique voice I could bring. I’ve landed on this one line: A country girl goes to church.

When Your Bedroom Disappears

Posted on by under Guest, Losing Place

Days before, I found the phone number by searching the address on the Internet. A young woman answered, listened, and graciously agreed to give us a tour of our childhood home.

When the day arrives, my older sister and I drive familiar roads in a rental car. We’ve traveled from opposite sides of the country to this point in Illinois; she from Massachusetts, me from Colorado. Park Ridge is one big suburban grid of long, mature tree-lined streets and sidewalks on the northwest edge of Chicago. I roll down the window and whiff the familiar aroma of fresh cut grass mixed with airplane exhaust from nearby O’Hare Airport. It is the smell of roots and flight.

The rental car engine goes quiet by the curb in front of the two story brick bungalow at 704 South Crescent Avenue. Our parents raised the four of us kids here; three sisters and a brother. This was the address on all official forms and most letters addressed to me from 1973 to 1989; from Gerald Ford to George H.W. Bush.

We ring the doorbell on schedule, and a young, upper-class mom answers the door, smiles, and invites us in. We politely walk through renovated rooms where I am tossed between a sense of happy familiarity and disorienting displacement.

We walk through room upon room of fresh paint and updated designs: The front entry minus the cuckoo clock, the living room minus the teal carpet and large flowery wallpaper, the front sitting room minus the TV and plaid couch, the upstairs plus air conditioning, the kitchen plus new appliances and a stunning renovation. We linger in the kitchen and I notice the one big minus. They knocked out this wall, she points and explains, we wanted to make the whole space bigger. That wall once divided the kitchen from my bedroom. Every morning I used to lay in my bed on the other side of that wall, listening to my mom’s early morning WMBI radio programs and dishwasher clatter.

music-box-ballerinaNow the wall has disappeared and my bedroom evaporated entirely, replaced by functional upgrades and a redesigned floor plan. I lost the container that had been crammed full of my girlish years,

the hanging macramé plant holders,

clouds of Love’s Baby Soft Jasmin’ perfume,

the sound of tiny nocturnal pet hamster feet running on a creaking wheel,

the wind-up jewelry box ballerina spinning in front of a tiny mirror,

the puffy pink gingham quilt my mom sewed,

and the way I always slept beneath it facing the door,

the muted bass of bands like Boston booming from my brother’s bedroom,

a closet full of off-limits clothes my little sister borrowed anyways,

that one spot on the floor by the cast iron radiator where I sobbed over boys that I loved,

a secret drawer full of seashells and saved letters,

midnight poetry taped to my window.

Gone. The inner sanctum of my childhood entirely dematerialized.

Why do I feel so sad? It’s just a room, I say to my sister as we drive away. She nods. Gets it. Siblings hold pieces of each other’s’ history.

We head out of town and curve through neighborhood streets, past the red and white marquis of the Pickwick Theater and the stadium lights at Maine South High School. By that park swing, I feel the sway and twirl of the six-year-old version of myself. In that parking lot by the high school band door, I feel the wild heartbeat rush of my first kiss; under that one elm tree, the between-two-worlds melancholy of twenty-something. And somewhere around the corner on my way back home, I find the room of my childhood again.

Rooms are the containers that hold the past, for good or ill. They are the spaces that store roots and fragments of who we were, the lives we have lived. Writer, author, Frederick Buechner describes it this way:

“But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” *

Sometimes my little sister and I end our texts or emails with the first line from Harry Connick’s song, “Forever, for Now.” “Meet me on the corner of close and soon,” we write. Then, “oxox” we sign off. Over the years, we’ve come to shorthand it. “Meet me,” we say and understand in a way only siblings can.

Meet me.

Meet me in the place with no address.

Meet me where the remnants of a past still live in pieces and fragments unclaimed, shared by few, in a room no longer contained by walls.

The name of the room is Remember.

* Quoted: Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (1992)

*   *   *   *   *

unnamed-2“When Your Bedroom Disappears” is by Kelley J. Leigh. Kelley is a mid-life writer and mom of four sons.  Kelley’s home base is a quirky little mountain town in Colorado where she writes openly about intimacy issues and recovery in marriage and faith. Find her over at www.kelleyjleigh.com and on Twitter: twitter.com/KelleyJLeigh

 

 

Nails in the Wall

Posted on by under Creating Place

I was on the phone with a friend of mine. She quipped, “You and I—we’ve just got a nomadic spirituality.”

Her tone was half-joking and not necessarily complimentary. Nonetheless, something in me latched onto it.

We joked about our nomadic ways for years. Because giving a gift to a nomad is hard, I made her a playlist of songs about wandering one year. There are a lot of options to pick from.

At the time, I was moving a lot, living wherever was most convenient for the ministry that I was doing.  Because the charitable work was connected to many properties, I had many options. I became the master of the power move—the quick pack without boxes, the shift to the adjacent neighborhood, as few trips as possible.

A friend needed a place to recuperate after serious illness. I moved out.

A donor made a house available. I moved in.

A friend’s husband was writing his dissertation and their family was on a serious budget. I moved out.

The home for homeless mothers was understaffed. I moved in.

And so on.

The moves were a form of loving. If it made more sense for someone else to be living where I was living, I would move. If I was needed somewhere, I would move. If a good opponail-sticking-out-of-wallrtunity opened up, I would move.

Settling in meant hanging pictures.  Forget buying furniture, putting a nail in the wall evoked a sense of stability.

During this season, space and place weren’t interchangeable. My “place” was the community of service that I was a part of. I belonged there. I was rooted in the work.  In all its beauty (and rough edges!), it reflected a big part of me. “Space” was where I happen to live at the moment.

But, something shifted.

Early this summer, I pulled up the dirt driveway of my childhood home with my car full of belongings.  I made the decision to return home and live with my parents, at least for a season.

As I went to fill the closets of my bedroom, I found box after box of childhood trinkets, school memories, and college mementos.

Little yellow baby shoes with daisies. My class photos from elementary school. My sequined costumes from dance classes. An enormous quantity of t-shirts. A binder of research from my college capstone.

Sorting through it all had a weightiness that was hard to bear.

But it made it evident. Here space and place intersect.

Here my hands were pressed into concrete as it hardened. The image remains. Here I notice that the roadrunner population seems higher than normal. I have watched the trees grow; I can see the shift in my own body, aware that I can no longer work as hard as I once could. Here pets are buried in the yard and the turtles return to the porch each season to be fed a piece of fruit.

I’ve been helping my parents with some building projects.  From their imagination and sweat, they are calling into being a place that can welcome others, a place of celebration.  We have different approaches toward meeting the goal.  We’ve bickered and hurt each other feelings as we try to work together.

Maybe I bring city ways to getting things done—I want to work a timeline, not waste people’s time, and stay a step or two ahead.  It’s not clear if I am helpful or annoying.  Maybe both.

Nonetheless, I’ve arranged all the furniture upstairs to suit my sense of form and function. I recently bought a bookshelf and I’ve been eyeing the sales on papasan chairs.

My artwork, however, is still piled up on the table, waiting to be hung.

It’s just so hard to put a nail in the wall.

IMG_20150809_231726899

The Treehouse

Posted on by under Creating Place

I was 17 when we moved into the house my parents now live in. They had been married 27 years and in all that time they had never owned a house. I grew up in rented places with delightful details like pink bathtubs and red carpet in my bedroom. I took pleasure in the fruit trees we were allowed to harvest in one house, and in the hot tub at another. But this house was different. Here we could paint the walls without asking (or even knock them down if we so chose). Here we could drive nails deep into studs without thinking about spackling them eventually.

My parents bought the house in the dead of winter, while I was at Tae Kwon Do class. I saw it after we had signed the papers, a fact I’ve never let them forget. But I too fell under the cozy spell of the house, sitting in the basement near the wood-burning stove. I began to see the potential in the bedroom which would become mine, the one with the bright yellow walls and the glossy hardwood floors. Even our dog seemed to like it.

Our new backyard was three times the size of the one we’d had at our rental. In the back corner, nestled in the 90 degree angle made by two neighbors’ fences, was a house high up in a large pine tree. It was made of wood and covered with pine needles, inside and out. Pieces of wood had been nailed to the tree, creating a makeshift ladder. My brother was 15, and he and his friends would play up in it for hours, developing and carrying out secret missions and daring escapes.

It wasn’t long before I started talking about having an office again. I’ve been writing almost since I could talk (my mother wrote down my dictated journal entries beginning when I was 4). I thought that if I had my own space, a room, a desk, plenty of office supplies, it would help me along on the path to creativity. I began to research garden sheds, dreaming aloud about how I would decorate one.

Some time had passed and my brother was no longer so attached to the tree house. It stood in the corner of the yard, high in the tree, silent and waiting. After talking about it for months, my parents suggested that I not purchase a shed, but use the structure I already had available. I went to the hardware store.

Friends came to help me paint. I covered the walls with a bright red color (chosen after some color Cara paintingpsychology research conducted with library books). When I rolled it on, it looked like wet blood. The floor was more challenging. I’d wanted black and white tiles, but we’d chosen to paint them instead. My parents helped me tape off the squares and we painstakingly painted them one by one.

I went to a salvage store and purchased old windows and hinges. My dad attached them to the holes in the treehouse and rigged them to swing open if I needed a little air. Next, I went to Target and bought sticky notes, lighting, a chair. (I inwardly thanked the former owners for hooking up electricity to the little house).

I bought my desk from a couple in the country at an estate sale. It was a light green and they were glad to see it go to a good home. I painted it black and my family lifted it, somehow, into the treehouse for me one day as a surprise. I laid down a rug for my feet and declared the space finished.

Cara's "office"I loved everything about my “office” except its reality. It was too cold to sit outside in Spokane much of the year. My fingers would get stiff and I’d wrap a blanket around me, but I had difficulty relaxing into times of creating. When it was warmer, the elevated office was unbearably hot. I would sweat through half an hour, trying to put two thoughts together, while worrying about the buzzing sounds coming from nearby wasps and yellow jackets. I am not an outdoorsy person.

Eventually, I abandoned my office, removing the furniture and equipment. I went away to college. There, I wrote not only for love, but for a grade. I curled up on the futon in the dorm room I shared with two other women, or caught a ride to Starbucks where I’d plug in my earphones. Sometimes I’d snag a room at the library or sit up in bed, typing away. I almost never wrote at my desk. I couldn’t get comfortable.

In my efforts to create the perfect place to write, over the years, I had failed to remember that I writeTreehouse best curled up on a couch, tucked into blankets, or in my queen-sized bed, a mug of tea next to me. I do my best to remove distractions and make myself comfortable, but I know the truth: when I’m held in thrall, I can write anywhere, and I do.

Stuck, Unstuck

Posted on by under Travel & Place

It was January—that moment when, in Michigan, you are still descending into the depths of winter. (Never mind that the days are getting longer, lighter.)

I was continuing to descend, too. My descent was more deceptive than winter’s—a postpartum swirl of hormones and emotions that could just as easily trick me into believing I was rising as falling. There were moments of brilliant sunshine on fresh blankets of snow, joyful baby squeals, and the sense that I had never quite been whole without this little one in my arms. In those moments I felt buoyed. Was the falling sensation I felt actually a rising—a trick of the mind?

No, that wasn’t the case. At least not in any comprehensive, lasting way.

It’s hard to say what exactly triggered me to finally shut down that January day—to batten the hatches, boarding up windows and barricading with sandbags as if to protect myself against a storm I had been watching move toward me. Now I know this about depression: the “what” or “why” hardly matters. It’s not as if identifying “what” means it could all be easily “fixed.” It just was what it was—a mix of chemicals and hormones, disappointments and anxieties, fear and regret, converging and swirling. And suddenly that day, that moment, I couldn’t keep up the charade that had kept me inching forward on previous days.

I could only sit, blankly. Sometimes with quiet tears forging new paths down my cheeks.

Finally, while my baby napped, I called my mom. I couldn’t speak, of course—couldn’t begin to explain a thing about what was happening inside me. But she still heard me, like mothers do. She heard the tears from 70 miles away, where she sat in my childhood home, and she knew I was stuck; she knew I needed to move.

“I’m coming to get you,” she said matter-of-factly, not asking or suggesting, only stating the fact in a way that allowed me to breathe a bit deeper.

So I sat as she drove to me through the frozen world. I don’t remember her arriving at my house, or helping me pack a few bags, transferring the baby’s carseat from my car to hers. I only remember the drive home—to the place I still considered home. I was, after all, only a decade removed from the time I had last lived there, the summer I was 19.

291654079_bc3cf3ce06_bMy mom had dark chocolate in her car, and as we traveled she told me to eat as much as I wanted—that it was good for me. She didn’t ask me to explain anything, didn’t ply me with questions or ask what I wanted or needed. She simply directed and gave, taking the wheel both literally and figuratively as she moved me from point A to point B.

As we traveled I felt the panic and confusion within me dislodge and begin to move downstream. I cracked open the shutters on my mind and began to take in where I was: The warmth of the car and bitter-sweetness of the chocolate. The beauty of the snow stretching out from either side of the two-lane highway—the way it was whimsical decorating the evergreens, and then sophisticated blanketing the ground, seeming to change color as it rose on hills and dipped into valleys, the late afternoon sun slanting onto its smooth surfaces.

I took in the one-stoplight towns in a way I never had before, even though I’d passed through them dozens of times behind the wheel of my own car. There were people on the sidewalks, bundled against the cold: a mother walking slowly as her snowsuited toddler kicked his boots through the snow; a group of three teenage girls who seemed to meander and stall, in spite of the cold.

The towns were then behind us, the speed limit rose, and I saw the sad, sinking homes down along the river, a man getting out of his rusted truck, pulled up alongside a satellite dish. Closer to home, the terrain flattened, presenting farm houses and sleeping winter fields. There was nothing remarkable along that stretch of road—no one, I imagine, living remarkable lives. There were just lives, and I noticed them as my mother carried me along.

Toward the end of our journey she told me a story about when she was a young mom—not to say “I know exactly how you feel,” but just, I suppose, to broaden my perspective and help me see beyond the walls of my confining mind, just as putting me in the car helped me to see beyond the walls of my house, my life, which had become too small.

What my mother knew, what she taught me, is that becoming “unstuck” involves some form of moving, traveling, even if you don’t know exactly where you need to go.