Momentos

When I was a little kid, I was enamored with my grandparent's house. It's a small ranch-style house, not particularly exciting in any way, but I thought it was the most beautiful house in the whole world. There were four things about the house that always made me happy when I saw them.

One was the three very small statues that sit on columns on the front porch of the house. I think they're cherubs or something, and they are nothing I would ever choose for my own house, but to me they were always the biggest signifier that we had arrived at our destination.

Two was the grand piano in the formal living room. It's white, and my grandpa can play beautiful melodies on it (although half the time I think he might be making them up as he goes). I took piano lessons for approximately one year, but the violin was already my instrument of choice, and the lessons didn't stick. Still, I remembered about five songs from my lessons and from having picked up what my friends had learned and taught me from their own lessons. I used to love to come in, drop my pillow and books from the long car ride, and immediately play my meager repetoir on that piano.

The third thing is a little rotating picture cube that plays "Close To You." The pictures in the cube have stayed the same for as long as I can remember, and include two of my dad and his sisters when they were little kids, one of my great-grandparents, one of my grandpa and his brothers golfing in the 70s, and one of my older cousin when he was a kid. This has always been on the nightstand of my bedroom and to this day, I always have to wind it up and listen to it at least once while I'm there.

The last cherished part of my grandparent's house is no longer there. When we were kids, there were two giant willow trees in the backyard of the house. My cousins and my brother and I would climb up into them and have our own "clubhouse". We played for hours in those trees. Alas, they got sick and had to be cut down several years ago. It still makes me a little sad to look out the back window and see empty space where they used to be.

I know the day will come when my grandparents will no longer live in their house. So, I try to cherish it as much as I can now. It's the only house that I've known my entire life, and there is a certain comfort to that. Walking into it and seeing each room, the mirror at the end of the hallway, the pattern of the linoleum in the basement, the wicker headboard of the bed in my room, is like clutching a favorite stuffed animal as you drift off to sleep when you're little. It makes my feel safe, nostalgic, and happy. No matter the craziness of my day-to-day life in Chicago, this is a constant that brings me back to the center. Though I've never lived there, it'll always been "home" to me.