The House That Holds Us

Thank you for the memories, San Jose!

Raised as a deep-roots girl by parents who stayed in my childhood home for 52 years, I’m about to shake things up. My husband and I are moving to the coast after 22 years of growing a family in Almaden Valley, San Jose, where our roots creep wide with sturdy support from friends and institutions that have long healed and stretched and nurtured us.

Ever since my parents passed and I helped sell my childhood home, I’ve told myself that it was never the house that mattered. It was the people inside who made it home. Maybe that’s what I needed to believe before I would give my okay to let it go live on MLS to be purchased by strangers?

But as the years pass by and I see pictures in my camera roll that place me so specifically in the scene of what unfolded in that home, on any given day worth photographing, the scales are starting to tilt 80/20, people to place. Come to find out, that 20% matters to my heart.

I never want to lose my connection to all the little things, like the various sofas that served as our seats: the chenille blue-green, the preppy pink-and-blue plaid, the beige that felt like Mom finally surrendered to the filth of her people and pets.

In my mind, my feet can still touch ground on the white linoleum flooring designed to look like tile under the blonde kitchen table that held our family dinners. I can still rest my elbows on faded woven placemats with fringe that my mom deemed “Swissy” for their pattern.

I can envision the roster of bedspreads and comforters adorned my parents’ bedroom – the last one fancy and custom – that were treated like royal furnishings until my dad started taking blood thinners that marred them with blood from his assorted scrapes.

I cherish the memory of the wee painted sign on the half-bath wall that depicted a bear and the script, “bearly a bathroom.” There’s the yard, too, where we played whiffle ball and skidded down the slip-n-slide, and camped in a canvas tent, putting on fashion shows with our flashlights.

I miss the laundry chute that was in my brother’s upstairs bedroom that became a tunnel for mischief as he snuck down it and out into the night. I miss my old closet that we were once small enough to perform Star Wars shows in with our cousins. I miss, in particular, the dining room with the ornate table with leaves that made holidays feel elegant when Mom brought out the linens and china for the occasion.

It will soon be time to carry another cherished home in our hearts as Russ and I say goodbye to the container that has held our family’s joys and sorrows, our safety and worries, our celebrations and our grief for more than two decades.

This house sits in the neighborhood where Russ and I built a community for ourselves by volunteering to coach robotics, hosting the elementary school variety show, and designing sets for school plays. It is the community that helped stretch me into leadership roles through Project Cornerstone and the PTA. It is where we met cherished friends on the blacktop, on soccer fields, and volleyball courts. In dance studios and at cheer practice. Just as our kids did.

We welcomed the friends we met in our community into our home with gatherings intended to connect, nourish, celebrate, and play. We hosted swim parties, slumber parties, and American Idol parties for the kids. For the adults, there were fun theme parties, often dictated by a specific color, that made things more festive.

And now we say goodbye to this house that was painted beige with black trim when we bought it, eventually painting it blue with white trim to make it our own. On a whim last year, we painted it cream (okay, more like banana cream … we all make mistakes) with bright blue trim, confusing our friends when they visit because it was blue for so long.

We say goodbye to the house where we hid Easter baskets and once put an egg in the pool on April Fool’s, claiming one of the occasional ducks that landed there must have laid it. It is the house where we know just where to place the birthday banner and tablecloth that we have been using for our celebrations since our first daughter was born.

We say goodbye to the house that once held way too much brown grout and patio aggregate that cut our feet. It had a pool until our swimmers moved away and we got tired of maintaining it for no one.

We say goodbye to the house where teenage boys used to ring our doorbell for ding-dong ditch. My husband and I would laugh till we wheezed when he would chase them down the street, once scaring one of them right out of his tennis shoes. It is a house that eventually required a security system, more to keep our mischievous teens in than criminals out.

We say goodbye to the house where, collectively, we recovered from a tonsillectomy, two partial diskectomies, and a prostatectomy. Where my mom stayed in hospice when her memory care facility closed its doors during covid. Where we were comforted on sick days that were mostly physical, sometimes mental, and occasionally just plain hooky.

We say goodbye to the house whose garden soil holds thirteen geranium shrubs, some of them now four-feet tall, that started in pots gifted by Mom for occasions like my birthday and Easter and Mother’s Day.

We say goodbye to all of this, but we do not say goodbye to our dear friends. Because dammit, we’re only going to be an hour away!