The House I Grew Up In

As I was editing a student's description of rain in an essay about her time in France, I was suddenly struck by a vivid memory – more likely an amalgam of memories, rendered into a singular image – of me as a child standing next to my mother, hastily but carefully pulling down sheets and my stepfather's shirts hanging on the clotheslines behind the house I grew up in.

I say "the house I grew up in" rather than "home" because my stepbrother sold it a few years after my stepfather died, preceded a few years earlier by my mother. To complicate things, that house, strictly speaking, ceased to exist before either of them, as they had it torn down to build what my mother envisioned as her "dream house," the kind she had always hoped to live in. When she told me about their plans, I had already been away from home for years, and if I had any feelings at all about it – though I don't think I did – I likely drowned them in scotch and Irish whiskey, like I did with all my feelings. 

What is most vivid about that memory isn't the image of either myself or my mother, but rather the clothesline itself, which until now, I had forgotten about. Standing about 5 and half feet high, it was composed of two T-bars made of 1" or 2" steel pipe facing each other about 20 feet apart. Behind them was the riverbed – usually dry until the fall and winter rains came – that separated the houses on our unpaved street from the cookie cutter condominiums in the strangely suburban subdivision that I always found sterile and foreign. There was nothing special about the clothesline, though the only two times I was stung by a bee, I was standing right next to it. It was sturdy. It served its purpose. In trying to map what part of the new house covered its old spot, I get lost in memories of the old house and the smell of grass. 

It's rare that I think about the old house: so rare that when that memory suddenly crystallized, I stopped editing and started writing this here, unsure of where it would lead or what it would connect to, but hopeful that it might take me back to the house I grew up in, or better yet, take me home.