1052 West Mill Drive NW.
This was my third house in three years, the one that I spent the most time in. Every other house has felt transitory- I was too young or did not live there long enough to form an attachment. It is the house that I still want to call home, but home has become an empty word.
We lived at the bottom of a hill, suddenly surrounded by tall trees, steep slopes, and torrential rain where before we were living in the rolling hills of Kentucky with its snow and its grasses. Our house was nestled to the earth on the right, perched precariously on questionably sound posts on the left. When you stood on the deck, you never were quite sure if you would end up in the creek instead. We mowed the strip of grass on the left as little as possible. We mowed the backyard once and from that moment forward left it to the will of the blanket of English Ivy. The hillside that led down to the creek was the home of trees that were quite worrying- they tilted far more than was comfortable- but each spring the daffodils and the crocuses would rise and bloom again and make it seem safe again.
My mother and I carefully tended our garden, once we had not so carefully torn out the previous landscaping to make it our own. In The Little Prince, the fox talks of being responsible for that which you have tamed, and tame it we did. I carefully tended my roses, Soleil and Anaïs. For the moments I did not need tame, I could simply go through the back gate and into the wild domain of ivy. The creek with its peace undisturbed by human intervention was just down the hill. These were the things that made an ordinary house into my home.
It was home for seven years, steeped in history and a repository for many treasured memories.