a story from my childhood
I can’t sleep because I’m nostalgic for a home I didn’t live in, so I decided to write about it. :)
When I was in elementary school, there was this girl I was best friends with (and lowkey had a crush on). She lived on a beautiful plot of land. The drive-in first passed a small house where one set of her grandparents lived, then in front of you would be the main house. The ground floor had an apartment they rented out for a low price to physically disabled people (nice of them) and the first floor up was their home. You’d access it over an external set of concrete stairs.
In it, the layout of the rooms was just so nice. A beautiful kitchen. A storage room accessible from there. A big living room with dinner table section. Several bathrooms. Floor heating. A dedicated office. A balcony facing the back garden; from it, a large wooden bridge led to the upper portion of the garden. The upper floor of their home had two children’s bedrooms, the master bedroom and a bathroom. This was magical to me who mostly knew crammed, ugly and small apartments with nothing fancy like floor heating in it.
The garden area was split into two, since the property was on an incline, so one section of the garden was the house’s ground level, and then a set of concrete stairs, and the wooden bridge from the balcony, led up to a higher set piece of land that belonged to it too. The garden had a pond with fish, a shed, a little vegetable patch and lots of grass. We found cool animals in it, like very large garden snails and blindworms.
It was all so big, but also cozy and well decorated. I always felt welcome and had a lot of fun. Everything felt so free. Her parents were very kind. I remember playing a Playmobil game on her dad’s PC with her, then lightning caused a shortage and somehow corrupted our save :( other than that, she had a lot of toys we played with. But my favorite was when we were playing outside.
We drew with chalk on the street, or played with their family dog, or made up games like needing to hide behind something when cars pass so they wouldn’t catch us. We explored the little village often. It has less than 50 inhabitants.
Funnily, I also lived there almost opposite of her place with my parents and grandparents until I was 2 years old, then moved to the bigger town over, where our elementary school was and we met. My grandparents always regretted selling that home. I remember growing up with our family dog there, and since it was very rural, being picked up by sturdy old farmers and put on the backs of cows, horses and donkeys. Our family dog, Monty, always guarded me and made sure I don’t walk on the street :)
When my friend and I explored the village, we usually walked through fields, or rang the bells of people we knew. One of them, for example, was Steven. He was slightly older than us, but had already met me when I was a little baby in the crib, because our parents knew each other. My mum was actually the reason he got diagnosed with being hard of hearing, because she suggested to his mum to get him tested. Other kids we visited were Yannik, Lena and Nando.
If we didn’t ring any doorbells, we went up to her uncle’s farm. There, he would take us on his tractor to plow the fields with him, or let us visit his huge draft horses. Our favorite was his big Ardennais stallion called Senator. Senator actually had such an impression on me that I still name horses in games after him (like in Stardew Valley).
And you know, I was used to all my friends living in big houses with gardens throughout my life, and objectively they weren’t that different from each other in terms of size or rooms. But that one is my favorite by far. When I dreamed amazing things, it would often happen inside that house. When I daydreamed and imagined a different life (back when it worked much better), it was there. When I read books with children or teenage protagonists, I imagined that home was where the character lived.
It wasn’t envy, I wasn’t even really aware that it happened. It just happened and I didn’t think about it. Whenever I imagined myself living in that house, it wasn’t that I wanted to be my friend or have her parents. It was just me in that house, alone, or with friends or characters I made up. In my dreams (at night or during the day), I didn’t have any parents, I was just living the Pippi Longstocking life. I didn’t even have a backstory for how I got there, where they were, what happened to them. I just didn’t have any in my ideal world. I’ll let that speak for itself…
Anyway, on nights like this, I miss that house so much. This is how others must feel about their family home. I don’t even wanna really see or know what happened to the apartment I used to live in as a child. Both me and my mother already moved 3 times since then. There’s no family home, there’s just different places we lived in. At least others can visit their parents and re-experience the joy of their loved childhood home; I will never be able to see that house again, most likely, much less enter it. I don’t know if the same family even still owns it. Probably not. The thought actually makes me cry.
I wonder if they ever finished the home. That’s what I left out, because as a child I was really good at ignoring it and it didn’t detract from its beauty to me at all, but the property was always in some sort of disarray because it was unfinished. The cement stairs were unfinished and had a placeholder guard rail and gaps of loose stomes, there were plastic tarps and scaffolding, removed bricks and piles of soil, cables being laid. It was like that for a long time; I think they ran out of money during it?
I know her brother was very sick. I know there were rumours her parents were splitting up. Now as an adult, I see signs in my friend that she was maybe a victim of abuse. I know her uncle is dead. Her grandparents, I think, too. Senator is long gone, as is the family dog. I haven’t been there in 20 years and I live far away now. There’s not even a version of it to go back to that I know… but I still miss it.
If I ever got a chance to buy it, there’s a part of me that would love to.
Published 08 Dec, 2024