To All the Houses I've Loved Before

I thought leaving my "forever" home would kill me. It didn't. Plus, a sneak peek of the novel-in-progress inspired by my love of old houses.

After many moves in my life, I still can’t decide the lesser of two evils: moving everything at once, or a few items at a time. Thoughts?

It’s been a challenge to steal a moment of quiet over the past few weeks. At the end of June, we moved from our beloved Capitol Hill rowhouse to a leafy, quiet neighborhood just over the bridge in Virginia. Five days later, we were on the road to Maine to begin our summer vacation. Add in a quick trip home to attend the memorial service of my best friend’s father (really, a second dad to me), and, suffice it to say, I am feeling all kinds of disoriented these days.

Home is both a mattress on the floor in our new bedroom in Virginia (awaiting a bed delivery) and the bunk bed I’m sharing with my daughter in Downeast Maine, where our extended family of eight is squeezed into an old farmhouse. It’s the empty room in Capitol Hill, where I lay my head for the last six years, and it’s nowhere. There’s no place that feels like “home” yet. Everything, especially the outside world, is a bit foreign.

Talk about a liminal space.

A few months ago, when a move was becoming increasingly inevitable, TC looked at me and asked, “Will it kill you to sell this house?” I swiftly answered, “YES.”

When we bought our home in Capitol Hill nearly six years ago, it was the realization of my biggest dream and the fulfillment of my longest-held hopes. It was proof that, after starting over after brain injury, we’d made it back - we had officially reclaimed agency over our own lives. To say I attached symbolism to that home is a gross understatement. To me, it represented a life I never thought I’d be lucky enough to live.

If you’re reading and wondering, then why the heck did they move?, I’ll direct you to an earlier post. Sometimes we invites change into our lives. Sometimes it beats the door down, arriving on its own terms. In this case, it was a combination of both, timed with a whole lot of other madness and uncertainty.

Houses often function as supporting characters in the story of our lives. As someone who moved a fair amount in childhood, I have a tendency to assign larger than life significance to the houses I loved most.

There’s the 1810 farmhouse in upstate NY, where I was born with the help of a midwife - a place that is pure magic. It’s the house where I ate snap peas straight from the garden. Where we raised pigs (!). Where I tragically misplaced my My Little Pony wallet. The house where, at five, I was visited by the ghost of a Civil War soldier (I especially love a house that comes furnished with ghosts).

And there’s the house in Phoenix, where I spent nine formative years of childhood, living on a mountain that was home to both coyotes and cacti, where I experimented one day with trying to fry an egg on the hot driveway. That house contained magic, too. Those were the days of free range parenting, when my sister and I were allowed to roam the neighborhood at our leisure. Where we once encountered a mountain lion in the alley of our cul de sac. Where we had a desert tortoise named Zoe, who was also free range, and returned every six months or so to say hello (we always knew it was her because our dog had eaten part of her shell).

There is the house in Southern Maryland that my parents built just before my father passed. Surrounded by marsh on all sides, I loved sitting in the living room and feeling the breeze travel in from one open window and out through another. It’s the house where my dad died, where I wrote Love You Hard, where we brought Charlie, our adopted island dog, when the city was too small to contain his zoomies. Where, years later, my own children’s turtle would die, and I would rest his remains in the backyard.

And, finally, our home in Capitol Hill. It was built in 1908, and sometimes, I’d trace my finger along a particular molding or floorboard, and think to myself, This house stood through two World Wars. It stood through race riots and the March on Washington. Think of all the things this house has seen. I myself bore witness as it stood through a global pandemic and an insurrection on the Capitol. The house and I bore witness together as my kids grew inches taller, had tea parties in the living room, and sleepovers in the basement. When, during the height of Covid boredom, they adopted the alter egos “Jackie Strong” and “Alyssa Catalina” and performed the “marriage dance” in the kitchen (yes, 2020 was weird). The many times we marked their heights on the archway of the dining room. The many times our neighbors would pop by unannounced with wine and lasagna and gossip and wonderful distractions. It was a house that was very good to us. And I loved being a caretaker in its long history.

Dear house, thank you for the memories. Be good to your next caretakers.

Other homes have less signifance. They’re the ones that function more like a rest stop between two life chapters. The house we’ve just moved into? It was built in 1935, so it’s practically new (ha), and right now, it feels more like the latter - a temporary launch pad. But who knows? Once books have found their homes on the bookshelf, it’s anyone’s game.

What’s for certain is that I love houses. The older, the better. The quirkier, the creakier, the more there is to love. But what I’m learning is that I don’t have to own a house or even be inside of it to carry on my love affair. My imagination and my memory are well equipped to continue that work for me.

It’s why, in late 2021, I began conceiving of the novel I’m currently working on - a gothic, domestic suspense story about a woman in her early 40s, who, during the pandemic (and following the death of her mother and the end of an actual affair), tries to fix her marriage and family by moving into her childhood home… a falling apart 1810 farmhouse in upstate NY (sound familiar??).

At the time this book idea came to me, I was very much not having a love affair, with a human or a house. I was feeling suffocated by life in the city, and trying to raise two small kids without a backyard during a global pandemic and in the middle of a political shitstorm. I wanted to be anywhere but Capitol Hill, which made it very easy to fantasize about an earlier chapter of life.

I’m sharing an excerpt below for paid subscribers, and I’m excited/nervous to give you a sneak peek at something that is very much still in progress.