June/July 1996 – August 1997

Sometime in 1995, my family started house hunting.  I’m not sure what exactly spurred this move other than that our house was paid off and it was a financially advantageous time to move.  At around this time, some family friends put their house on the market – a house and property that my parents had long admired.  While I could see the merits of the new house – especially the pool – I mostly remember deeply resenting the idea of moving.  I didn’t have my drivers license, much less a car, so moving anywhere would mean being impossibly far away from my neighborhood crew.

By the time we moved in the summer of 1996, the house had undergone substantial renovations.  The original house was fairly small, so my parents worked with an architect and contractors to knock down walls, build a second story with bedrooms for each of us, expand the kitchen, and add a garage when it became obvious that the original garage didn’t actually connect to the house in the way they thought.  As was the case with the previous moves, Mom found herself pregnant during this renovation, and my brother was born a few months before we moved to the new house.

On the ground floor: my parents’ suite, including a room that was supposed to be an office but became Eric’s when he was conceived between the architectural designs and move in. Their bathroom, one of my favorite rooms in the house, had a whirlpool tub, a sunlight, and a panel of stained glass. A “great room” with a wood-burning stove, a ceiling extending to the second floor, and views back to the creek and bordering arboretum. The kitchen, with similar views, where you can occasionally see a deer or fox while eating your breakfast on a quiet morning. Upstairs: three bedrooms, one for each kid. Jenn’s and my rooms connected to a shared full bath; Mark had his own 3/4 bath. Downstairs: a small exercise room and a larger family room. A 3/4 bath lined in pink tile under the stairs. And then the pool/pool house: roll-down canvas panels covering the screened-in walls, and a bathroom where there were always more bugs than I liked to think about. Perfect for pool parties or cookouts, not so perfect if you had to close it up at night.

I only lived in this house for a little more than a year – beginning the summer before my senior year of high school, and ending when I moved out to go to college. I returned for a few months here and there, but in total spent less time in this house than I have in a couple of my subsequent apartments. Maybe that’s why it’s never felt like home for me – I never had the time to settle in and make it my own, or perhaps I actively avoided doing so because I knew I would be leaving soon, or perhaps I resented it for not being the house where I grew up in the neighborhood that I loved. That year was also kind of crazy – I was a senior, applying for college, and working two part time jobs. I had major roles in the fall play and the spring musical. There was a new baby in the house and then, over the winter, Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. We all shouldered extra responsibilities.

I loved the windows and the breeze in my new room. I took the van to Lowe’s and returned with a trunk full of cinder blocks, which I used to build brick-and-board bookcases. I burned incense and listened to Procol Harum. I read piles of library books in the saggy double bed that previously belonged to a great-grandpa (or great-great?). I annoyed my parents by walking too heavily – my room was directly above theirs – and by staying up late connecting to Juno so that I could email friends. My friends and I dressed for one of the high school dances in my room, and took photos down by the creek. My adolescent rebelliousness flared in the last summer I lived there, and I couldn’t wait to move out.