The House That Was My Home

It was the fire that made me realize the house was no longer my home.

I was thirteen in 1996 when my parents gave us the news. We were leaving Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where my family had lived for nearly four generations, and moving to Jacksonville, Florida. Our family business had been merged with another, larger, business and the casualty was life as I knew it. As I had always known it.

For fourteen years I lived in Jacksonville. I worked there, and went to school there, and tried to build a life there, but I never liked it.

Except for our house. I loved our house.

It stood at the end of a long driveway, not even visible from the street. It was two stories of pink brick, and sat on the bank of a large river that snaked its way through the city. When the enormity of my new life was too much to bear, I took myself to the backyard and to the end of the long dock that stretched out into the river, and I would rock on a wooden swing and stare out at a horizon lit by the wild pinks and reds of sunset. And it was there I would sit as the air grew heavy with the balmy scents of the south. As the tropical darkness enveloped me in its comforting arms. With a backyard like this, I would tell myself, this new life really wasn't so bad after all.

My house was my center. It was my home.

It was a home full of laughter and love and family. A place where I wasn't a stranger to my surroundings. In my first years there, the house played host to countless visitors from my old life, who arrived toting open arms and an exquisite familiarity. And in later years it was filled with new friends, who brought a touch of comfort to a life that never quite stopped being new. When my sisters and I went away to college and beyond, it was never the city that we yearned to return to. It was the house that had become a home.

And after fourteen years, when the business was sold, and our old life in Pittsburgh beckoned once more, it was the house - not the city - that made it hard to say good-bye.

But we did say good-bye, hung a sign in the front yard, and hoped the house would sell, despite the depressed Florida real estate market. No houses were moving, and no one had much hope, so my parents settled in to Pittsburgh as if they had never left, figured that the house would sell when it did, and decided not to worry overmuch about it.

But a few weeks later, much to everyone's surprise, they got an offer on the house. The buyer wanted to pay cash and close quickly. A date was set, papers were signed, and then the house was no longer mine. And relief merged with sadness, because the house really was a good home.

Exactly thirty days after the closing I got the call. It was my mom.

She told me that earlier in the day, the house that was my home had burned to the ground.

There was nothing left.

Not of the house. Not for us. Not in Jacksonville. Not anymore.

I heard words like "electric" and construction" and "possible arson" and that may have been what caused the fire, but that's not what the fire meant. Not to me.

The house was telling me that it was time to go. That we were right to leave.

That the house was no longer my home.