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I wrote this piece during my senior year at Davidson. My parents have moved four times since I started at Davidson 8 years ago, so it's still poignant. As are the memories...

The main entrance. My sister, Laura, sat every afternoon on the tan colorless carpeted stairs that ran out just at the base of the door. The dog, Sugar, a huge mutt who caused havoc by peeing anytime she got excited, sat at Laura’s feet. Sugar didn’t dare climb up and sit next to Laura on the step. The steps were where her territory ended, the only rule that lasted of the original dozen made upon Sugar’s adoption. Laura and Sugar sat and stared out the glass door most weekday afternoons around three o’clock. A whiff of applesauce, self-sauced by my mother now with a sore “applesauce shoulder,” wound its way from the blue-and-white checked kitchen, down the hall, and into the main foyer. The heavy wooden door that normally slowed the flow of cold air from the wintry Illinois afternoon stood ajar to allow a clear view for those left at home on such silent afternoons. The other kids were at school, but were on their way home that very minute. My mom has a picture of that very scene – my sister and dog on the stairs of that house, waiting to for the kids to come home too.

The family room (and dining room). Dad was always coming home with gadgets. He came home with the microwave, he came home with the video recorder, he came home with the home entertainment system that sat along the far wall of the Tampa family room. The system had a huge television, well, at least huge compared to the old televisions. And the VCR and the surround-sound speakers that made watching the Star Wars movies even more exciting. Or Top Gun – my father, the pilot, could fly along in the F-16 with Tom Cruise and Goose, thanks to those speakers. The family room was the closer half of the long room that also housed the dining room. My mother lamented, “Lizzy, I just don’t know where to put the furniture in this room, all long and narrow like a bowling alley!” So the bowling alley became the dining room and the family room – something my brothers appreciated on Sundays when church ran a little late and it was necessary to watch pre-game of the Dallas match-up during a late lunch.

The only time that family room saw all of the family members who called that house home was at Christmas. Then, the Christmas tree sat behind the longer of the couches, a leafy green with plaid strips of burgundy and a navy blue that matched my father’s military uniform. The love seat parallel to that couch was equally beloved for movie viewings, but the longer couch had an additional plus – the recliners that folded out at each end. So there had to be rules – unofficial, of course, so they could be molded to meet the needs of the oldest sibling in the room. Whoever sat on the long couch had to forgo use of the camouflage poncho liner, soft and silky from years of washings, that had been with our family since around 1985. Dad was always in his tan Lazy-Boy recliner down by the love seat with the collection of remote controls on the cheap round side table. And the always swinging door that led out of the bowling alley and into the kitchen meant that not only could food be fetched quickly, but everyone knew when food was being fetched. Still none of the kids can get M&M’s from the dispenser or cookies from the strawberry-shaped cookie jar (with the stem for a lid) without someone yelling: “I heard that!” And usually, that was the point.

The bedroom. Always cloudy, like Eyeore. Our bedroom was always cloudy. That’s what my sister and I remember about our Illinois room. We had twin beds that we loved to jump back and forth on, and the wall near where we put our heads was painted blue with white clouds. My sister and I begged my parents to paint the wall white, but they never did. And now, that’s what we remember most. I had a hanging lamp over my bed that I turned on at night after my younger sister was asleep. There Meg and Joe and Beth and Amy Marsh and I became Little Women together, and Anne Shirley and I became “kindred spirits.” Mom had to come in some nights and make me turn it off, lest I read the night away. “Lizzy,” she whispered, “That’s enough.” And she knew cause she stayed up nights reading the night away, too. The bedspreads were matching, an off-white color with pink and purple flowers, a cheap material that, after a few washings, started to pill up. Laura had Cabbage Patch sheets on her bed, and I had Strawberry Shortcake. We never ever traded sheets. The alcove in which the beds sat opened up into a larger area. Along the far wall, just under the windows, were our desks. Laura had a little wooden desk with a roll-top that my grandfather had built for my mother, then too tiny for me, and I had a big rickety old black office desk that my father had rescued from some heap. The drawers banged and clanked when I shut them since the metal was warped. I loved that desk. I had my files and my paperwork. A small brown table with four chairs, all missing pieces, sat at the center of the room. Laura and I played school there, and the student sat at the table and the teacher sat at the big desk. Laura and I played restaurant there, too. Along the opposite wall from the desks stood our kitchen, a yellow plastic kitchen with a refrigerator and oven and burners. We had pots and pans and all sorts of plastic food. We had workers’ hats from McDonalds that we would wear. We made menu after menu and then made our parents come upstairs and sit at the little brown table and pay us a quarter for a plastic steak and cup of bathroom water in a dirty plastic teacup. And they loved it and we loved it. Cloud nine.

The hallways and stairways. Sometimes it rains…and sometimes it storms. And that’s when the kids have to come inside and play. And that’s what hallways and stairways were made for. Computer games and Ninetendo were latecomers to my family, so the bunch of us grew up playing games together. Our Virginia house was made for these games. The hallway that ran down past all of our bedrooms was the bowling alley. My brothers took my mom’s cutting board that she used for sewing, my sister took the multi-colored building blocks that were also the source of many hours of entertainment, and I took the nearest and least destructive looking ball I could find. The other game of choice was mini-golf. I don’t know where that set came from, but my brother and I had a set of mini-golf clubs, pastel-colored balls, and yellow plastic holes with flags that we set up around the house. The most difficult shot of that game was from the stairs that ran from the kitchen down to the family room. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen stairs, but we’d take storybooks – Hop on Pop and Mr. Moo Says Moo, Can You? and The Berenstein Bears and the Messy Room and Mrs. Pigglewiggle – and prop them up to make a ramp. Neither of us ever got a hole in one on that hole.

The basement. My parents joke that they almost divorced over our North Carolina house. My mother loved the little brick house on the corner. My father hated the little brick house on the corner. My mother loved the house because it reminded her of where she’d grown up. There was a country song on the radio about the time we moved into that house – “Love grows best in little houses, with fewer walls to separate.” Maybe so, but that house was a point of contention between my them. Since the basement flooded every time it rained, my father spent every Saturday down there checking for leaks and caulking the cracks and trying to avoid calling a contractor. And though my father knew what he was doing, he wasn’t a contractor. He finally consented to get help after Hurricane Fran came through, and for a week we had dirty men with jackhammers tearing apart the foundation of the house. What got torn apart got put back together, though. And we even got a dry-basement warranty.

The yard. Kids need to be outside more, and I have a hypothesis as to why they aren’t. They don’t have yards. The yard at our Illinois house was a great yard – just open space and a few trees that grew about the rate of the kids at that house. There on the worn wooden porch, Sugar got bathed, and the watermelon seed spitting contests took place. Across the yard, along the chain-link fence, tall sunflowers grew, the heads flopping over when the plant got too heavy. A brown-and-white metal swing set at the far end made for hours of fun. There were swings and the teeter-totter swing where kids sat and pushed back and forth to go higher and higher. The boys climbed on the main pole, and the girls did gymnastics on the rings. Somewhere off to the side sat a baby pool that got filled with water in the summer. My sister and I were just babies there, and my brothers loved to come back from the creek with catfish and throw them in the pool while we were still in there. Such hooliganisms were followed with the yell for “Maw-awm!” by my sister or me. The greatest feature of the yard, though, was the leafy oak tree out front. We spent hours out there climbing. How my sister and I ever made it up there, tiny as we were, I’ll never know. I have a picture of us up in the branches of the tree, probably taken by a parents. That was my childhood, up in that tree with my brothers and sister. That’s how a childhood should be, out in a yard.

I love my home. I know my parents will still make out in the kitchen when my dad comes home from work. And my mom will tease me when a boy (or a grown man!) calls me. And my dad will make corny jokes and ask who ate the M&M’s, when he knows right well that he ate them all. And I know my brother will be quiet and moody and then chase me down with a gecko in hand and ask me why I’m so moody. And he will pretend like this wedding’s no big deal, but then act like a horny thirteen-year-old when his fiancee visits. And I know my other brother will come home from school and bullshit with my dad about the Braves and tell my parents everything’s fine – even if he’s flunking every class. And I know my sister will tell her secrets and fall asleep next to me on the couch. And she will take a picture for no other reason than she’s having a good hair day. And be goofy with me. And I know the dog will want in and out at least a hundred times a day. And my dad, who swears he hates the mutt, will leave the radio on in the porch when he leaves her out there. This is my home.