Home

I remember running up and down the driveway, pacing around the house before and after dinner, anticipating bedtime, knowing that the only thing I could do to relax was to get a little out of breath.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know we were moving. It was years and years before we actually did (a house built in the mid-18th century doesn’t exactly fly off the market). The kitchen didn’t have modern appliances, bats made homes in all three of the chimneys (and then slowly made their way into the house), every hurricane season, the unfinished basement flooded up to my knees.

I remember my queen-sized four-poster, my first “big girl” bed post-cribdom. I had to scale the dark wooden posts in order to reach the mattress.

I remember having to make my bed perfectly and organize my stuffed animal kingdom every day before school, in case someone came to look at my home.

I remember waking up on sweaty summer nights to whooshing above me. I’d open my eyes to see a black shadow whizzing in circles over my head.

I remember Dad would run around my home with a tennis racket. He always had an impressive forehand. The next day, he’d take the smashed body, enclosed in a brown paper bag, to be tested for Rabies.

I remember, lying on the floor of the “downstairs playroom,” I told Mom and Dad that I wasn’t moving. They tried to explain that home was wherever family was, but I told them I couldn’t leave, that I’d like to negotiate something with the new family.

I remember four buyers fell through before a woman was finally going to buy my home. Mom and Dad sent us to stay with our grandparents in Michigan so we would avoid the trauma.

I remember that the woman who bought my home was named Giovanna, and that on the day my parents moved, she threatened to withhold her signature from the contract unless they agreed to pay for and oversee the installment of a new, “state of the art septic system” in the backyard. My parents—their books, artwork, furniture, and toiletries already loaded into a moving truck—agreed.

I remember I had my first panic attack that August night, 500 miles away. Sleeping in the same room as my sister, a makeshift guest room in my grandparents’ glass house, I started to shake as my heart climbed to my throat.

I remember coming back and meeting the new house, a contemporary with an open-floor plan, perched half a mile from the road on the top of a wooded mountain.

I remember the nights that followed. As soon as I turned out the light and closed my eyes, I would imagine myself alone on a small sailboat in the middle of the ocean. I thought about my parents upstairs in their new room. I imagined them asleep. I was the only one awake in the house that wasn’t my home, and that made me feel like I was the only one alive.

I remember the way Dad returned to the house after work that autumn. He would talk about lawyers and Giovanna, project managers and contractors. He and Mom would fight about money and my home. In between sets of jumping jacks and high knees, I reminded them that I had told them so.

I remember the warm Saturday in October when Dad enlisted all of us to remove rocks from the old backyard in order to prepare the lot to be bulldozed. When we got to my home, I realized that it was already gone. She had painted it a harsh baby blue and ripped up all the grass in the backyard. The patio was empty except for a single freestanding lawn hammock. We got to work under the midday sun, digging up rocks and carrying them off the property one by one. Giovanna came out around 2pm. She was dressed in a silk wrap and wore a floppy sunhat. She looked at us from her slight vantage point, untied her robe, and then flung it over the railing. In nothing but a golden bikini and a large-brimmed hat, she strutted to her hammock.

I remember I was properly exhausted that night, and I slept well.