Where I Lay My Head is Home

Dr. BB and I got engaged in the kitchen of an apartment he lived in on Emerson Avenue in Minneapolis. I can still picture it with its black and white tiles and table by the window. We moved into an apartment on 38th Avenue together and it was flooded with sunshine and had a lovely cross-breeze and tiny, impossible to clean pink, grey, white, and black tiles on the bathroom floor. I cried when I left those apartments for the last time. We started our life together in those rooms, building our relationship one Bones episode at a time, and I couldn't imagine being away from them or the city itself.   How were we, Dr. BB and I, how were we us without Minneapolis?

I get attached to places in a way that I don't get attached to things. I loved those apartments and the ease to the lakes and the Greenway and the light rail and downtown and Caribou Coffee just across the street and grocery stores just around the corner. I loved how the rooms enveloped me in safety from the bustling city outside.  

My mom lived in the same place for more than thirty years. She and my father bought a "handyman special" when I was seven and we lived in this drafty giant farmhouse for many years until one day the county declared it uninhabitable and my parents built a prefabricated home on the same lot.  I was in college when they build the "new house" and I didn't have time or energy to deal with the loss of that first house. I just picked out a paint color for a room I probably only ever spent one hundred nights in and moved on with my busy life.

My dad died in that "new house." Gizmo, Salt, Midnight, and Dusty roamed the yard as nearly wild dogs over the years. I had a major fight with my high school boyfriend in his Hyundai in the driveway. My sister broke her wrist climbing the giant oak tree in the front yard. 

It was a place I could count on. I knew my mom would always welcome me. I knew it was my safety net. It was messy and full of stuff and smelled terrible, but it was my childhood home. 

I took this photo last summer when my mom still owned that house.

Last week my mom sold that place. She packed up all her stuff, moved it into a barn on my sister's property, sent me old report cards, photos, and awards, and left that property.  I drove there and packed up old Legos and stole a trunk from my old bedroom and filled it to the brim with the detritus of my teenage years.

And as I drove away I cried.

I get attached to places and my roots are deep there in that tiny map speck in Michigan. I haven't lived there longer than I did live there, but that doesn't mean I'm not attached to who and what it made me. I don't like the idea that my mom is now rootless and without a place to call her own.  I don't like knowing that I no longer have the right to climb up on a tree in the yard and look out over the cornfield. 

So now I'm here in a big old drafty house in a small town in the next state over. I have two end tables, a trunk, and a dresser that I took from my mom's house. It's time to make new memories in a new place, I guess. It's time to acknowledge that my home is no longer my childhood home. And maybe someday soon I'll be okay with that.