Homecoming

The emotions of the last few days have made me think quite a bit about the past and about an essay I once wrote about the day that I decided to return to my childhood home. Here is how that piece begins. As with all my memoir work I write not to dwell on myself (never an entirely interesting topic) but, hopefully, to transport the reader, by way of suggestion, to her own childhood.

Today, then, I wonder: What is the one prevailing image that emerges when you recall your childhood home?

When I was 13 my family moved from one idea of suburbia to another, roomier version. It was what families did, what families still do, and besides, my father had been transferred. I was in eighth grade, then in high school. I moved out, went to college, got a job. I married a man from El Salvador, and next I had a son. Somewhere in the midst of this I lost my childhood. I listened for the pulse in my husband’s surreal stories and could not find seduction in my own. I raised my son the way all mothers raise their sons, with an emphasis on now and, then, tomorrow.

But even when you’re not looking for it, the past will up and find you. Someone from before will hunt you down with a treasure of a tale, or with a challenge. Someone will salvage an old photograph and slip it through the mail. Someone will say, I remember you singing, and someone will say, Whatever happened to that shoebox?, and one afternoon in winter your brother will get a look on his face that suggests honeysuckle and lightning bugs and stars watched from the roof. My brother climbed trees when he was young. My sister made mud patties near the swing. I played kickball on a street that ran a circle around our home.

Memory is episodic, aggrandizing, mischievous, iconic, and also mostly all we have of who we were back then. The anecdotes are easy; it’s the continuum that eludes us—all that falls between the heroic and the mournful, all the taken-for-granted everydayness that you can never see from a distance. Measured in terms of time and contradictions, my childhood can’t be reached from here. Measured by asphalt and traffic lights, it’s a 50-minute drive.

Somehow or other, though, I never drove in that direction. Not in all these years. Somehow I hadn’t journeyed back, and then, of course, I did. Down one country road and to a highway. Across another country road until it intersects another highway. At one point you turn left and, heart in your throat, you hunt for signs. For a neighborhood pool. A neighborhood field. A hiccough of a circle, and a house...