No place like home. . .

There are three keys to my house sitting on the dryer. The new tennents will never have to cut a key again, because between Jake and I (well, mostly Jake) we've accumulated what must be a lifetime supply. A key would go missing, but we'd still need in the house all the same so my mom would reluctantly have another one cut. Sure enough the old one would turn up two days later.

Anyways. I just got back from an awesome trip Williams, and everything was great... but as I walked in the door it struck me that it would be the last time I'd ever return home to the house I grew up in. Im not generally a person opposed to change -- as a matter of fact, I've been looking forward to the new house with about as much enthusiasm as I, Anneliese Joan Neumann, the girl who can't care less about a trip to Europe untill she is at Pearson International staring at the aircraft about to take her overseas, can muster.
But this, this hit me kind of hard. And I have no idea why. And all of a sudden when I think about the fourteen years of my life I've lived in the house, all these mundane and overlooked things seem really special.
For instance, there's been a chunk missing out of the top of the front concrete steps since before we lived here. And it appeals to me for some reason... every time I've waited out there for a ride, or sat outside and talked on a cordless phone, or just sat out and enjoyed a summer evening on the front steps, I was aware of that characteristic. I probably sound crazy to anyone reading this, but I guess that was one of the little things that meant I was home.

One hell of a crazy concept "home" is. I rarely get attatched to things, and I never thought I was attatched to this house, but it's the one I kept coming back to, whether I liked it or not. I mean, when I was born, I lived in the house next door. Then there was that unfortunate little stint to the East Coast, but soon enough my family (well, three quarters of it anyway) was back on McTague street.
Then there was the whole 'half of the house burnt down as you slept inside it' incident when I was in grade two that forced us to relocate to Glasgow street for a few months. But after that it was back to good old McTague!
And then there were the times that I found myself in such a funk that it would have made no difference to me if the walls were made of solid gold, everything around me seemed so cold and material and utterly unremarkable that the building could have imploded and I wouldn't have blinked an eye.

And now its hard to believe that this is going to be the last time I fall asleep under the same roof, under the high ceilings that, try as I might, I could never quite touch no matter how high I jumped on my bed as a kid.

Christ, I'm sentamental right now. It's not really the first time I've felt like this though... Before the whole moving fiasco began, when the landlady popped by out of the blue and informed us our house was going to be put up for sale (the old bag actually expected my mother, a single mom with a not exactly fantastic paying job, to turn around and pull $275,000 out of her ass for an ageing, poorly maintained - although beautiful - house that was only worth $204,000 according to taxes), my mom had done some painting. She'd painted the livingroom, hall, TV room and my brother's room, and there were about 20 different paint sample cards taped to the walls of every other room in the house. This had been her home for fourteen years and she loved it and had no plans of leaving. I knew it was her dream to someday own the house (she'd put an offer together at one point, but the landlords wouldn't consider it for a second) so why not, in the mean time, fix it up the way she'd always envisioned?
Anyways. Practically the second after the landlady's visit, all of the paint samples dissappeared off the walls. This was depressing to me, because when they came down I saw her giving up a dream.

I'm not exactly sure what I'm giving up... the setting of my childhood, but that's gone with the wind. Its funny, because I never really had a real sense of this house being my 'home' untill I left for University...
Whatever. Life goes on. At least we'll have two bathrooms (hallelujah!) in the new place. And my room is painted ou-la-la red!
I'll miss my beautiful childhood home though. As much as I bitched about how small my bedroom was, or how wickedly hot it got in the summer, or the shower sucking, I know I was lucky to grow up in this place, and call it my 'home'.

Ta Da.