In the early morning hours of the days before we moved to our current home, I lay awake and listened to the sounds my house made. Some sounds I could never place; others told me sweet stories.
I heard a creak in the attic and thought about the first few nights we spent in the house. My oldest daughter, Jenny, was seven and living in a two-story house for the first time. Lying in the bed beside her as she drifted to sleep, I soothed away her fears that the dark held something more than soft shadows. The scratching on the window, I told her, was nothing more than a tree waving its branches, welcoming her to her new home. A small lamp, emitting a muted light, calmed her when I returned to my bedroom.
During the daylight hours, when sunlight streamed in the windows, and she believed strangers lurked upstairs, I canvassed her room, looking in nooks and crannies, in closets and under her bed, reassuring her no one was there. Only then would she come upstairs.
Eventually, Jenny grew accustomed to her house. She spent hours alone in her room. I could hear her laughing as she talked to friends on the telephone, connecting with them in ways that I will never connect with her. I was sad, yet I was glad. The sounds were those of a happy young girl, one who had made a place for herself in a world far from my own.
Emily, my youngest child, had just turned eight a few weeks before we were to move. She couldn’t remember any other house but the one in which she then lived. “I don’t want to move,” she said, as we rode our bicycles on quiet streets. I pedaled in silence, letting her words linger in the cool wind that blew on our faces as we rode against it. Later, when we parked our bicycles against the brick wall on the carport, I hugged her.
I drove by the 50-year-old house that we would soon occupy, often, trying to vary the times so the current owners did not see the girls and me. We were embarrassed by our eagerness, but talking about the house, seeing it, and planning improvements helped to ease the ambivalence we occasionally felt about the move.
As I envisioned the future in the house that would be our home, images from the past mingled with my dreams. I lay awake at night a few weeks before we moved, hearing the sounds of my home, imagining they were the sounds of my new home. They soothed me, opened their arms and enveloped me. I was ready to greet them, ready to create new stories to fill my memory. And that is another story.
Listen to me read my essay on “From All Sides,” a weekly radio program on WUGA, Athens, Georgia. (I converted an audio cassette tape to a Windows Media Audio file; the sound drops in two places, but it returns in just a few seconds!)
[aesop_audio src=”https://www.storiesfromacottage.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Memories-Make-A-Home.wma”]
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