House You Grew Up In

The key still works. That surprises you. As though the house would have changed the locks without you.

The door opens. The smell hits first. Not the smell of now, whatever now is, new paint and empty rooms. Underneath that, fainter but there, the smell of years. Of the specific air of a place that held the same family for a long time. Meals and laundry and something that has no name but that you would recognise anywhere, in any darkness, as home.

You step inside. Your feet know this floor. They know where the third stair creaks. They know the slight slope at the kitchen threshold. They know the particular squeaky board at the turn in the hallway. The body remembers buildings. Even when the mind has been away for years.

The rooms are enormous without furniture. The living room is just a room now. Floor and walls and light from the same window. But you are seeing it double. The room as it is and the room as it was. The armchair that used to face the television. The carpet that showed a path from door to sofa, worn by years of crossing. The lamp in the corner that was always on by four o'clock in winter.

In the kitchen, the window over the sink. The view from this window might be the most looked-at view of your life. More hours in front of it than in front of any landscape, any screen, any painting. A garden. A fence. A tree. These ordinary things, seen through the kitchen window while the kettle boiled and the dishes were done and the radio played.

Go up the stairs. The creak. There it is. Like meeting an old friend.

The room where you slept. Smaller than you remember. That is always true. The rooms of childhood have grandeur in memory that the physics of adulthood quietly corrects. But still. This room. This ceiling. This view from this window, where you lay awake as a child and watched the night sky or the rain on the glass and thought all the thoughts of a growing mind with nowhere yet to put itself.

The wall where something hung. You can see the nail hole. The thing that hung there is in a box somewhere now, probably. Or gone. The wall holds the memory of it.

Stand here for a moment. In the middle of the room. Where things happened and did not happen. Where childhood was simply lived, without knowing it was being stored.

The house is empty. But it is not empty of you. Every room holds the weight of years. The rooms do not know they are empty. They are still holding everything that was here.

Ask them to hold it a little longer. Then close the door gently on your way out.

The key still works. That is a kind of blessing.

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