Where the Heart is

The house my father moved into two years ago is the kind of house that a passerby would not particularly notice; it is the kind of house with a slightly unkempt front garden, where ivy creeps up the post of a mail box and weeds peek from beneath the gravel of a rock bed; it is the kind of house where the garage always hangs slightly opened, concealing a girlfriend as she smokes her cigarette; it is the kind of house where two old and slightly over-weight dogs forget to greet visitors upon entry. It is an ordinary home, with ordinary residents, and ordinary features, existing merely to serve the purpose of being a “home,” nothing more, nothing less.

There are three bedrooms, one a master and the others for my brother and me. They each embrace their denotation: rooms with beds. No posters on walls, no photos in frames, no souvenirs on shelves. A mirror covers the entire east wall of “my room,” but reflects nothing, for the walls are bare. A hardwood floor replaces carpet, but rejects the occasional feet attempting to cross it, for it always remains cold. A window is centered above the bed, but lets in little light, for it is concealed behind a blockade of blinds and curtains. The rooms hold the title of “Chloe and Jack’s,” but they are not; they are motel rooms, places to stay during the night and abandon in the morning.

A tattered leather couch strewn with blankets and television remotes is pushed against the living room wall. A Lazy-Boy neighboring it stands as the throne for more remotes, often eaten by the large creases surrounding the chair’s worn cushion. Both face a large flat-screen TV—always turned on, always playing football, rarely watched—propped against the wall. Adjacent to the TV is a fireplace stacked high with individually packaged fire logs, and sitting above is a loan candle, price tag still intact.

Suspended in the air of the three bedrooms, and the living room, and the bathroom, and the dining room is the scent of fresh laundry. If one were to listen closely on any day of the week, the faint groan of a washing machine would be distinguishable. Grass stains earned at soccer championships are removed as quickly as they appear; campfire aromas lingering on sweatshirts are eliminated; tears wept onto pillows are forgotten and the distinct perfumes of new Abercrombie sweaters seize to exist. Once the laundry emerges from the dryer, the clothes are “like new,” but for someone hoping to cling to the memory attached to them a little longer, that is precisely the problem.

From the moment I was born until the separation of my parents, I lived in only one house. The house, now identified as “Mom’s house,” stands on a street of many similar homes, varying only in shades of grey. There is nothing striking about the house. It’s normal. Looking in however, it is noticeable that the house is different. In the living room, a modest bird’s nest is positioned inside a glass dome and long sticks budding soft flowers are held in an antique vase on an antique table. The mantle is covered with candles, each one carefully situated. There is no television, only an old-fashioned fan and a surplus of family photo albums. The dining table is decoratively set with a handmade center piece and burgundy place mats chosen specially to match the couch in the previous room. I can recall friends coming over, peering at the immense hunch, the centerpiece of the living room, and poking fun at each precious knickknack located throughout it, wondering “where the TV was” and whispering “I don’t get it.” They didn’t get it.

From my second story bedroom window, trees are all that is visible. I’ve watched as they changed from fall to winter to spring to summer while my room changes with them; over the course of fifteen years, the trends passed with the seasons, replaced by my current obsessions. The dresser transitioned from cluttered to neat periodically as the walls went from bare to plastered; the bed traveled across the room as the night stand followed, and the colors morphed from greens and blues to yellows and pinks. The carpet—off-white, stained, and dingy —was always littered with various articles of clothing. The muddled floor never changed, but the clothes themselves did. In that bedroom, I had grown from a baby sporting onesies to a six-grader wearing strictly tank-tops and jeans to a sophomore infatuated with tights and dresses.

Each week I found myself continuously struggling to feel at home in both houses, but each week I found myself continuously failing. My father’s house was bigger while my mother’s house was better. Impersonal, unfamiliar, and distant—my father’s was foreign in every way while my mother’s was where I had grown up. My father owned a house while my mother owned our home.

The items my mother collected to place around the house, the endless changes made to my bedroom, the countless photo albums and pictures that line the shelves, the things my friends “didn’t get” are the things that make my house home. I will never be able to call my dad’s house my home simply because it is not. It will not be the house I return to for Christmas in college. It will not be the house that I’ll imagine when I picture my childhood. It will merely be a house: it will be the house my father lived in.

-Chloe