The Lingering Ghosts of Our Childhood Homes

(This piece was meant to be a guest post for the Linden Way blog tour, but due to some technical issues with the host’s site, I’m posting it here instead.)

My childhood home wasn’t mine for long. If a house has memories, I am the ghost of one—there and gone, like smoke. But my own memories are like ghosts themselves, the kind that linger, the kind that follow you in and out of dreams.

We lived in that one-story red-brick home from the time I was nine until I was thirteen. That’s it—five years, and yet they seem to encompass my whole childhood. Bookending those years were stretches of poverty—subsidized housing, postage stamp apartments—as my mother, a Panamanian emigrant, struggled to support her children on a waitress’s income. It was her brief second marriage that lifted us temporarily into the middle class, where we were able to afford our own home, on a street called Linden Way.

That home, with its basement bedrooms and red shag carpet, is clearer to me than any of the places I lived in during my teens or twenties. If I close my eyes and really try, I can remember them, but they mean nothing—they were simply places, walls and carpet, kitchens and bedrooms, a balcony or maybe a porch. Until I purchased the house where I would raise my children, decades later, the house on Linden Way was the only place I’d ever considered a home.

I remember slumber parties in the basement, digging for worms in the backyard, lying on my bed and listening to records for entire afternoons. I remember my stepdad splitting wood for the fireplace, my brother playing his guitar in the room next to mine, my best friend tapping on my window and slipping through in the middle of the night.

But I have no memory of leaving.

My last memory is of my stepdad sitting at the kitchen table explaining to me that he was moving out. The next thing I remember is living with my mother in a two-bedroom second-floor apartment a few streets over. It was fine, I was fine. I could still walk to my best friend’s house in eight minutes flat, I could still hang out at the elementary school in the evenings, swinging or playing on the bars.

I could also walk by my old house. The one that no longer belonged to me. And when I turned sixteen, after my mom and I moved to a rental on the other side of town, I could drive back to the house on Linden Way. Park across the street and just sit awhile.

Eventually I moved away from my hometown, and in the thirty years since I’ve returned only once, when my daughter was three. I stopped by the house. I asked the owner to take a picture of my daughter and I standing in front of it.

Many years later this moment would become the opening scene of a book, one where childhood homes have unworldly power and memories are living things. In the pages of this book I wrote tributes to the house on Linden Way, a place that I would go back to if I could, but only for a little while. I wrote tributes to the basement bedrooms and red shag carpet, to the marvel and myth of memory, to the lingering ghosts of our childhood homes.