You Can't Go Home Again

I spent a couple of hours last night immersed in my old pictures, looking for pictures of our first house. We bought this house in 1995, right after I finished my masters degree and right before I got pregnant with Josh. We fell in love with it the minute we walked through it, and loved it even after we knew we needed to leave it. It was a tiny little cottage on a half acre wooded lot, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, it wasn't exactly in the best neighborhood. Eventually, the desire for a safe home for our growing family pushed us to move, but leaving was still difficult.


This is the best picture of the home I could find last night. It was owned by a landscape architect before us, and he filled the yard with decks and trees and a pond with a waterfall and raspberry bushes and flowers. We added a hammock, a strawberry patch, a sandbox for Josh, secret paths through the tree farm in the far backyard, a swinging bench, and one year we even bought a live Christmas tree and planted it in the front yard. This picture doesn't really capture the magic of the house, but it was a wonderful place to dream and to start a family. Other than the meth labs down the street. And the neighbor boy who shot out our garage window. And the burglary and vandalism... Oh, stop. Let me remember it lovingly, just for today.

It has been a few years since I'd driven by the house. This is what I saw when I drove up.


Yes, that is tall grass growing in the driveway, in front of an abandoned truck. You can't see that the lawn in the front has gone to seed or that the porch boards are starting to rot out. You can't see that the next owner sold the back half of the lot to the rest home that bordered it, and that the roof of the house is starting to sag. And that huge pine tree that blocks the view of the house? Yup...that was our little Christmas tree.

No, you can't go home again. Life moves forward. It always does. But I wish my house still looked like it does in my memories.