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The day I came home from the hospital, as soon as we got out of the car, before I ever went inside, my dad, so the story goes, carried me first to the front door, then all around the outside, whispering in my ear "this is where you live, this is your house." Then he walked me through the inside, and repeated the same. That was going-on twenty-eight years ago.

Now I'm writing this in a motel room in Wisconsin, and that house is not my house anymore. For good. I've left, my mom is leaving. By the end of the summer, I will never step foot in it again. As you can imagine, I'm mixed up about that.

I spent a long time with mixed-feelings about that house. I would occasionally visit schoolmates' houses, especially starting in middle school, and their palatial abodes in woods of Holly and on the arboreal lanes of Flushing and pontoon boat-bedecked shores of Silver Lake made my little house in Flint feel (to my addled adolescent brain, anyway) something akin to a quonset hut on the wrong coast of some benighted, atom-bombed South Sea island. Even my friends who lived in better parts of Flint had me envious.

You mean you can walk all the way to the park? And up to 7-11? Alone?!?


I quit living there year-round in 2000 when I went off to college. That will be eleven years ago this fall. I've gone through quite a lot of transition in that time. To Albion, to Washington, back to Flint, back to Washington, to Grand Rapids. But that little house on the corner of Welch and Seneca has always been there.

Now I'm moving on with Roz and our kitties, and my mom is coming to live near us, a decision that makes me almost inexpressibly happy. I suppose now home will be where we all are. And that will be great. But there will always be a little place deep down from my first home, the only one I've really ever had.