Houses that Some of Us Miss

Daniel asked me yesterday whether we're ever going to go back to the farmhouse.

"The farmhouse" was a tiny, three-hundred-year-old house ( yes, this is New England) on the edge of some (fruit) farm property, which we rented for about a year, between selling our old house and buying the new one. Daniel's question is funny because we were so outrageously cramped in the farmhouse that we could bare function. We basically went a year without having guests, because we had so much stuff, and so many people, all in so little space that chaos prevailed in the physical realm. So Amy and I have no nostalgia for the farmhouse. But I asked Daniel if he missed it, and he said he did.

He then volunteered that he also missed the other house, something like "the house before the farmhouse" where we lived when he was a baby. This touched a nerve, because I miss it to, especially because it's where all of our babies were babies. Amy told me, within the last year, that the boys miss that house because they remember playing trains with me on their train table in the basement - like that's their main memory of the house. Ian once mentioned missing his bedroom closet as well, because you could hide in it, or something like that. But Daniel mentioned the split-level architecture as something that he missed - a point that Ian had raised to me, in the past, as well:

Daniel said, "It had the stairs at the door, and you open the door, close the door, and you're on the stairs." He added that Ian had reminded him of that compelling structural advantage. I think this was something Amy particularly disliked about the house - the whole split-level factor - but it didn't strike me either way, because I thought the door more as being at the meeting point between two floors than in the "middle" of a staircase. But I think to a boy's mind, that has to be fascinating in its own right: stairs normally are just a passage between two floors, but it's like our split-level had a special "surprise" halfway up or down.

(January 15, 2011)