Viewcrest Drive

Today my parents are moving from the house they’ve lived in for the past 19 years in Fairfax Station, Virginia. The empty-nesters have bought a row house in an exciting hip neighborhood in D.C. My mom, a city girl, was never really suited for suburban life, but the schools were better and neighborhoods safer just outside the city in Fairfax County. I called Viewcrest Drive my home from age seven through the day I left for college in California. 

   I was trying to explain to my boyfriend how significant this move is. “It’s the end of an era”, I said.  He grew up with divorced parents seemingly always on the move from house to house in the San Francisco Bay area.  He’d live one year with his dad, another couple with his mom, and never lived in a single house for longer than a couple years.  He couldn’t understand how I could be getting so sentimental about a silly house.  Miranda Lambert has song where she talks about leaving her childhood home called "The House that Built Me".  I explained to him that our Viewcrest Drive home is the house that built me, my sister Steph, and my brother Geoff. 

I’m going to miss the squeakiest front door in the world. The kind that you’d most certainly get caught seeking out of in the middle of the night at age 16. One wall in the laundry room is completed marked up with lines and numbers, my dad’s record-keeping of our heights as we grew inches (and feet, in Geoff’s case) through the years. I remember when I was so small I could hide inside the cupboard under the bathroom counter while playing hide-and-seek with the babysitter during my parent’s weekly Saturday date night. I loved how my dad always had to get the biggest Christmas tree on the lot, sometimes so big that the angel on top stuck up into the skylight. I remember gathering on my parent's bed as they excitingly told us that we were allowed to get a puppy. A few years later we gathered on the same bed as they told us dad had cancer, but that it would probably be ok (which it was, and is). I remember helping to teach my little brother how to ride a bike in the driveway. I remember Easter egg hunts at home, and the annual family photos that accompanied them

I remember signing our initials in the wet concrete on the sidewalk outside that remains in place today.

I remember birthday party sleepovers where we stayed up all night playing on my Ouija board, and then slept through the afternoon strewn across sofas.

 I remember fashion shows in the foyer with our neighbors, the Scharls

I remember that party I had in high school while my parents were out of town, and desperately trying to clean up all the beer stains the morning after.

I remember sobbing on my bed after my first heartbreak, and falling apart in my mom’s arms as she lovingly reassured me it would all be okay. And it was.  

I remember graduation and the homesickness I felt on the first day of college, knowing that “home” was so far away. 

Today is the day we say goodbye to Viewcrest Drive.  When I fly back to D.C. next, all of the furniture my Gramps hand-painted will now be housed in a new home. My old yearbooks will no longer be on the bookshelf of my childhood room, but in a box for me to take back to Portland.  And this is okay, because we have new memories to make in this new home.  After all, home should be a feeling. So maybe I am getting a little too sentimental after all. 

“In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world.”- Ari Berk