Home

This month, Scribbit's Write Away contest is about "Going Home"

The problem I have with "going" home is that I'm already there--I live in the house I grew up in. It's changed some, mostly in paint colors and the patio in the back, but it's still effectively where I grew up, and when I sit on the front porch with my Sweetie, I feel like I've become my parents.

This house is also full of tiny little crevices of memory--memories mostly of Dad, since he's been gone 19 years this month. Every so often, we clean out a cupboard or a drawer or even the entire garage and find things my dad left there. Things from my childhood, things that cause him to just fill my brain...and my eyes with tears.

Mostly, though, I'm struck with the not-so-Disneyesque circle of life. My son was 3 months old when my dad died, yet, he looks so very much like my father that he's recognized by people who, for all intents and purposes, have never slapped eyes on him. He's usually dumb-struck over this, disbelieving in their eyesight, I imagine.

I can remember when the Toad was about 2 years old, in bib overalls, toddling about the yard, and I sat on my porch steps and cried because, even then, I knew what my grandmother had seen in her son (my father) as he toddled about her yard, all those years before.

It's a powerful thing to feel that connected to a woman who died when you were 6--someone who is hazy memory flashing behind your eyes like so many fireworks on a July weekend.

Then I see my daughter--the irrepressible Howler. She is all snap and fire and motion, and I know my father would laugh himself breathless to see her (and me with her.) I feel that, as truth, most often in the months we're outside. This hurricane of motion and feeling and noise would amuse him to no end.

I've read that smell is our strongest link to memory--and that we can remember the feelings associated with infancy if those memories are linked to a scent or an odor.

This is what I remember about my dad. How he smelled. How he smelled clean, and how he smelled after work. How his clothes smelled and how his hair smelled. The aftershave he used (Old Spice), after 19 years, will still send me reeling into a memory binge.

I remember being little--as young as the Howler is now, and cuddling up with him as he lay on the living room floor to watch TV (read: nap) after supper. I remember how, unless it was very warm and humid, he didn't mind me--except for my being "all elbows and bony knees" digging into him and stealing his rest. I suppose this is where and when those smells burrowed into my brain, waiting decades to resurface and bring me home.

Both my children, when clean, at the end of the day, smell like my dad. That particular showered-in-the-AM-but-been-up-and-alive-all-day smell. Not sweaty, or dirty, just a sweet, barely there smell that was just him. And they've both got it--some part of him that passed down through years and my DNA.

It's cliche to say, "you can never go home again" and in some ways this is true--even if you live in the same building or town where you grew up and first knew "home." It changes and you change until neither is recognizable to the other on a superficial level.

But sometimes, under that exterior, you find a crinkle of memory strong enough to allow you to see it and know it as it was. Sometimes you get moments where its as though childhood magic fills you again with belief and love for this world you grew up in. You experience it again and realize that "home" is where you are--as long as you can remember you.