Take a moment. Sit down. Close your eyes. Think of all the places you’ve lived over the course of your life. Which of them made you feel the safest, the most loved? A place where, when you think of it brings a spontaneous grin to your face. In other words, Home with a capital H?
For me, it was the house my family lived in during my high school and college years. We moved in the day I started high school in September 1972. That morning I left the house we’d lived in since 1964 as an 8th grade graduate and came back to a totally new abode a high school freshman.
It was brand new construction in a new subdivision, “Bethany Heights,” located about a half mile south of where we’d lived for my grade school years.
It was also quite probably haunted. (Hard to explain with new construction, but there you go.)
My bedroom was downstairs. To this day I can close my eyes and see the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window. It was quiet, safe, and felt like a private sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the house. Ironic, considering the main gathering space in our house, the family room, occupied the same floor.
My dad had big plans for that house, only a few of which actually came to pass. He built a pair of floor to ceiling bookcases, dividing the living room from the dining room. He also built a wall of bookcases framing the window in my bedroom. He wanted to have a fireplace sunk and built in the family room as well as digging a secondary exit through the sewing room and putting in concrete stairs back to surface level, but neither of those ever happened. We did finally get an in-ground pool, but it happened only as I was getting ready to move out on my own.
My soon-to-be best friend lived across the street. We met shortly after my family moved in. Ken got me turned on to hi-fi equipment and rock-n-roll. As I’ve mentioned before, we’d sit in his room after he got back from CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Chicago every summer and pour over the bags of brochures he’d brought back, dreaming of someday owning the equipment ourselves. When it came time to upgrade my childhood bicycle for my new commute to the high school, I followed his lead and got a yellow Schwinn Continental. Did parents really let their kids bicycle nearly three miles to school on these Phoenix streets on their own back then? Apparently so. Furthermore, it was expected. I got a ride to and from school only under extraordinary circumstances.
During my senior year, I had a crush on Daniel, a boy whose family had moved into the newly built part of the neighborood on the same street about a block to the west. When I say crush, I mean crush. We became friends. We hung out. We liked the same music. I liked taking long drives with him in his pink mustang. And keep in mind this was 1975. I wasn’t out, and profoundly frightened to profess my undying love, especially since he’d given no hints the feelings were mutual. (I’d tried that with a boy three years earlier only to destroy a friendship.) Anyhow, after my parents and sister would go to bed, I’d go out the side garage door, climb up the fence and onto the roof, and walk to the highest point of the roof that gave me an unobstructed view of the entire neighborhood—including Daniel’s house. I couldn’t see into his room, but I could see when the light was on and he was home. Crazy, huh? It’s not like today, where kids can call or text each other’s personal phones at any hour. I just wanted to make sure he was home and safe. I could’ve slipped and broken my neck countless times, but thankfully I was sure enough on my feet that it never happened—and no one called the police to report a boy on the roof of the house. But it was the 70s and a very quiet neighborhood.
This is also the house from my youth that still appears most often in my dreams.
beautiful, man
That’s a difficult one to answer. The first house I owned in Connecticut was a 2 bedroom 1 bath kitchen and LR cape built as “temporary housing” for GIs after WW2. I paid $30,000. When my then boyfriend and future husband decided to move in we had the upstairs finished to be the master bedroom and office. I think having Leon by my side made it a happy place. But the little house on 3 acres in the wooded hillside that we later bought together in Bristol CT was also a very special place with many great memories. And now we are in New Mexico. In the stucco house (I’ve always loved stucco) that all our guests say is cute/lovely/warm. But we are on Pueblo land so it doesn’t quite feel like “ours”. They say home is where the heart is. And so I guess there is some truth to that.
Nice house; nice memories.
My family home I grew up in was in Southern California, and it has never come back to me in dreams. Rather, it is ‘The City’, as it is known, San Francisco. Almost every night the city comes back to me in dreams, specifically, my beloved place of business. As well as the various streetcars and bus routes in the city. My favorite place of residence in the city is not often in my dreams however. That would be Fox Plaza Apartments on Market St, (16th Floor, Apt. 1604), facing N.E. the High-Rise was at an angle, with The Ferry Building and The Bay Bridge coming alive at nightfall.