I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
--Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art.”
Like many military brats, I’ve been searching for home my entire life. I attended eleven different schools during my K-12 years, and lived in nine different houses with my parents, not to mention the assorted apartments we rented while on brief TDYs or waiting for “permanent” quarters. One of those houses is the one I remember when I think of growing up, but our family lived in it only three years, during two separate periods of residence.
Those were happy years, on an Air Force base, where everyone was in more or less the same boat, and the other kids didn’t wait until I was leaving to warm up to me. The speed limit in the housing area was twenty-five miles per hour, and I was old enough to ride my bike anywhere I wanted to go. We had a flat-roofed, mint green, mid-century ranch, a deep setback and a lush green lawn with a cottonwood canopy. I watched Star Trek reruns with my brother and sister in a converted garage family room, and we ate dinner over green shag wall-to-wall, made from food stored in our avocado refrigerator. You know: the ’70s.
That house doesn’t exist anymore; the entire neighborhood was razed, updated and redesigned to use water more sparingly. But even if it did, I couldn’t go back to visit. It’s a closed base, and I’m not part of the military community, now.
Most summers we drove our camper to visit our grandparents in the San Francisco Bay Area, and though there was very little to do in their quiet homes, there was a great deal to see. There were family pictures and knickknacks, sedate parlors with old-fashioned furnishings, artifacts from our parents’ childhoods and shared adolescence. Nothing much changed from year to year, and that consistency was grounding.
I loved those houses. One was built into a hill, a ’20s bungalow with a treacherous front staircase—so we always entered through the back door. The house was pink, with decorative exterior molding and a peaked roof, a bird bath, a lemon tree, an arbor and a feral greenhouse. Inside it was dark—creepy, even, because the drapes were kept closed and the dark hardwood floor swallowed what light did make it in—except for the cheery kitchen. How I loved that funky, old kitchen! By far the largest room, it was painted yellow with a blue ceiling to bring down the incredible height. I can still see the ’40s ceiling lamp, the glass decanters in the west-facing windows, the stairs down to the service entrance, and the cupboard with rotating shelves that my grandparents were terrified would pinch our fingers. And my grandparents themselves, already old in my earliest memories, and seemingly an organic feature of their home.
My other grandmother lived in the downstairs flat of a gracious old Italianate that had been made into a duplex. It was built the same year as the little Edwardian we bought in Lexington. House-hunting here, I realized suddenly that I was looking for that house, that beloved house with its grim front hall and sunny main rooms, pocket doors, crown-molding, wainscoting, jacquard wall paper, coal fireplace; the quirky old kitchen and bathrooms. Leaded glass in the foyer. Built-in curios stuffed with dusty porcelain figures. Picture rail with china balanced atop. Grandmother waited for us to arrive out front, on the brick porch, her legs crossed at the ankles.
My grandparents’ homes were also the reason I fell in love with our white house in Yokohama. It was airier than either of those houses, but it was also old. Built in the 1930s, it offered the quirkiness of layered modernizations and walls steeped in decades of human experience and emotion. Our life soaked into the walls there, our last integral family years. The white house stands empty now, a monument to our idyll, and I ache for it. Sometimes I wake up and, with my eyes still closed, imagine I will open them to my bedroom there. I slept with the curtains open when my true love was away, so I would wake to the sun coming up over the tree line on the ridge.
I’ve lived in nine houses with him, too, not counting our pre-child apartments. I’d hoped we’d establish a permanent home, but our sons didn’t even grow up in one country. Stability was never going to trump opportunity and adventure for us, and we raised a brood of third culture kids because of it. I wonder if our brick Edwardian will be our last house, the forever house. All of our boys have spent time under this roof, all of them graduating from college while we’ve lived here. It’s our last chance for a home that forms a link to our family years.
A house is more than a house. It is the stage on which our private lives play, a repository of memory, and an enduring witness to the relentlessly ephemeral: a grandparent’s smile, a child’s exuberance, the chaotic energy of a growing family. I remember my parents dancing over the green shag carpet of our ranch house in the desert, and the marathon board games my guys played on the dinner table of our house in Yokohama. My favorite memories in our Lexington house are of the Christmases we’ve spent here. We've come together to remember who we have been, and to embrace who we are and who we will be, welcoming new dear ones who stretch the boundaries of the family that is our future. For now, at least, this house is home.