I have really only lived in about four houses in my life. This is, of course, not including the dorm rooms and apartments of college and those few years afterward when I shared a variety of great and terrible living spaces with friends. This probably explains why my nesting instinct goes pretty deep. I am a person of minimal nests. Anytime my husband and I begin to talk about moving….some day….to a smaller more manageable space, I often have a visceral, choking sensation someplace at the base of my throat.

Until I was eighteen I lived in the same house my mother still lives in. It is a house that started out as many did in the early fifties. A box shape with four rooms and a bath with others exactly like it lining the treeless street. Over the years it has had at least two additions that I remember and several remakes to make room for more kids and more stuff. The tall maples now dwarf many of the single story homes. It is the nest from which I launched. I love the look of it, the smell of it, and memory of it. It is simple and understated but it is my image of home.

Last week I stood with our neighbor as the moving truck pulled up to her house. She has not lived full time in this house for years. She lives most of her time in Alaska where her adult daughters immigrated some years ago. The oldest of these daughters was present for this final move, this final sale of her ‘growing up ‘ house. The mother told me what a mess her daughter was, crying over the loss of this childhood connection. As I listened the mother’s eyes also filled with tears. So much life had been lived in those walls and now that chapter was truly coming to an end. My heart went out to them both knowing that I would be having the same reaction, will be having the same reaction some day.

Our oldest son came home to a house we no longer live in, having moved to the house we now call home when he was a little over two years old. It is a house I loved, the first I had ever had a hand in owning. When we left that house, I had to be the last to leave, staying long after the last box had been taken away. A friend who understood stayed with me as I moved from room to room sweeping and remembering, saying goodbye. To this day when I am in that neighborhood, I drive by to see the house and marvel at the now enormous tree we planted as a sapling, a wedding gift from friends.

These places we call home are important. The walls live and breathe our joys and sorrows, our laughter and tears. They show the scars of our arguments and the marks of children’s growth. They house our memories and ground us in a community and landscape that knows us and names us. We are imprinted in them and they in us.

I am imagining that my neighbor and her daughter were experiencing all of this and more when they put the final box on the truck and closed the door for the last time. She told me the new owners were going to make some changes in the house and she was sure she did not want to see them. She offered a place to stay anytime we come to Alaska. Seems a far fetched chance but I nodded my assent as I left her to her severed grieving.

Someday another neighbor will no doubt have a similar conversation with me as I pack, clean and close the door. No doubt, like her, I will not want to see the changes that will be made in this place in which so much has grown. Until then I am feathering my nest for the summer that is just around the corner…… and the years yet to come.