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Last week, Landon took me out for a midweek lunch date after my annual and much-dreaded OBGYN exam. It was the perfect page turn after my disproportionate agita leading up to the (uneventful) appointment. We ate at Caribbean Grill, one of our favorite hole-in-the-wall spots in his hometown of Arlington, Virginia, and then picked up some groceries from the nearby Teeter. As we were walking into the store, he paused and said, “God, I have so many childhood memories right here.” I knew the exact sensation he was feeling, the accordioning of small remembrances; it’s the same way I feel anytime I drive or walk the stretch of Connecticut Avenue between the Cleveland Park and Van Ness metro stops. How many thousands of times did I tread that path? It feels, impossibly, like it belongs to me, as if it’s an extension of my specific and circumscribed experience growing up. No one else could possibly know those sidewalks like I do (of course people do). No one else has (of course people have) felt the exact backyard feeling of cutting through the alley to Upton Street on a hot August afternoon, when the asphalt radiates heat and city, and the cicadas are screaming, and the dense neighborhood trees hang heavy in the humidity. Then — the narrow streets lined with cars; the advertisements for the Levine School of music stapled to the telephone poles; that 1990s feeling of freedom. Finally, the steep walk down Tilden to my childhood home, a stone Tudor built in the 1920s, the descent entirely shaded by sylvan canopy and charm.
When my parents moved out of that house, I was away at college, distracted by my new boyfriend, and not particularly sentimental about their decision. One of my sisters took it hard, though, pleading with them to change their minds. I think I would have felt the loss more acutely had I been around to pack up my childhood bedroom, and shut the door to its imaginings.
When I think on it now, I think about the somatic experience of it: its peculiar sounds, and smells, and coldnesses. It was an old-fashioned house and I don’t encounter any of its signature sensory hallmarks on a regular basis anymore, and this lends a high-hazy nostalgia to it. For example, it had a screen door that scraped and then slammed too-fast on the heel and a marble checkerboard floor in the breakfast room that was heated in the winter by the enormous HVAC system just beneath it — not by design, I don’t think, but we made round use of its auxiliary benefit, laying our winter coats across it to dry or pre-warm. I think too of the mirrors that lined the entirety of the front hallway, from floor to ceiling: you could not escape your own study if you tried. And the carpeted “back steps” up to the second floor — the easiest way to sneak in and out undetected, always taken two at a time. There were gridded radiator covers built into the window beds, on which you could sit (not for long, or you’d boil) and watch the snow come down, and there was an apple blossom tree by the garage that rained petals in the early summer. Also: quirky hand-painted tiles around the sun room fire place, and a makeshift bed my Dad would lay out in front of it for the entirety of the fall and winter: two pillows, a blanket. That sun room smelled forever like wood smoke; even in the peak of summer, you’d emerge from watching a movie smelling of the hearth. The exposed, dollhouse feeling of that room on a rainy day still draws something soulful out of me when I think of it: three sides of it were enclosed by glass, and beyond it, foliage and a little jut of the gray flagstone back patio. The cold, damp earth smell of the basement. The sweep of the Georgian-style windows with their thin sashes and heavy iron sash locks, and their leniency with letting the cold air in. The swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen. The rose trellis. The narrow butler’s pantry where my grandfather made my grandmother gin martinis; the tinny sound of water pelleting the metal sink at its end. My father’s woodshed. The clang and terror of the furnace room. The click and whir of the rotary phone in the basement; the bell and clack of the companion typewriter in the attic. Pipes that ran very hot or very cold. Radiators that banged and hissed in the winter.
Yes, it was a somatic house, and out of keeping with the times. I was too young to understand it while living in it, but now I see that it belonged to a different generation, and I think because of that — because of its difference from all the modern homes in which my friends lived, and in which I have since dwelt — it afforded me an uncommon imaginative stretch. Just a tiny bit of cognitive dissonance, a scant slippage in which I’d find myself thinking often about things belonging to past lives, and wondering what those lives might have been like. I think in other words that my childhood home was an invitation to imagine, and full of small, quirky nooks in which to do it, like the built-in cubby in my bedroom, in which my younger sister or I would often curl up with a book.
How much of that house shaped my writerliness? How grateful I am for it.
What did you love about your childhood home? Do you carry anything from it with you into your adult life? Do you think it shaped you in a meaningful way?
Post-Scripts.
+Washington, DC and the parochial wild.
+Foods that take us back to our childhoods.
Shopping Break.
+I’ve been seeing a lot of great pieces in this fab kiwi-chartreuse color, like this cotton dress, this skirt, and this cocktail party number.
+Today only, SoldOut is giving us 25% off this selection of their fabulous products with code MAGPIE25. The assortment includes this FANTASTIC tee shirt dress (own and love), my beloved RSVP dress in cherry red, and their incredible everything shirt in stripe. (I’ve raved about this shirt so many times. It is the most luxe material with a high-end, oversized shape.). I live in their tanks and tees and scooped up this striped one!
$100 cashmere in every good color.
+A perfect fall tote.
+Continuing with our bandana-print obsession: this skirt!
+Cutest side table for under $200 – love the bamboo detail on the legs.
+LOVE this throw-and-go dress.
+A propos of my current obsession with overalls: two Magpies raved about these soft ones from Z Supply!
+I just had to buy these for my girl!
+Fashion-y Adidas track pants.
+I own this dress in two prints but love it in the solid brown!
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This was gorgeous – I was captivated by your sensory, evocative descriptions of your home. It reminded me of The Dutch House and I realized writings about houses is one of my favorite subgenres (all ears for recommendations if anyone has other favorite writings on home!). I grew up in a 90s Cape but would have loved to have grown up in an old home. The broader setting of my childhood – a coastal Maine village – shaped me more than the physical house, I think.